Team Fusion #364, Bayou Regional, FMS Woes

[Jimmy the Kidd]

Originally Posted by Dale

This may not be 364's issue but I am wondering if we're just seeing the result of more 5Ghz 802.11n being rolled out to devices in the stands. At numerous regionals we get consistent reports of robots working fine on the practice field, in their labs and even on the competition field before or after the day is over but failing in competition.

At the Oregon regional my phone was showing dozens of active devices all broadcasting their whereabouts in the stands. Some of this might be teams setting up WiFi hotspots for competitive analysis (against the rules) but many were people oblivious to what their laptop or iPhone/Android was up to.

I'd suggest a first step for regionals this week is, when problems develop, have EVERYONE in the stands turn off WiFi on their laptops and phones and use a sniffer to see if that has taken place.

The other thing that has changed this year is more and more teams are streaming video from their robots at fairly high resolution (I know we are).

This is my exact line of thinking. I maybe looking into this too superficially, but when we don't work, it's when there are people in the crowd. Most of them are tech savvy, gadget toting people. Is it wrong to hypothesize that the root of our problem is as Dale says?