Running a robot through a wifi network

[jbsmithtx]

We recently setup the axis camera on our robot and many people in our school would like to have the ability of the robot to travel all around the school. Our school has a large WiFi network, and we were wondering if somehow we could link the router on the robot to the network routers, and then connect our dashboard up to the WiFi network. Is this type of connection possible? I know from my research on CD that this probably a very primitive question... Also, if there is some sort of long distance reliable connection you know of, please share. We are a budding team and we are trying to gain continued support from our small private school, anything like this that we could do would amaze them. Thanks CD

[Mark McLeod]

The basic network aspects are relatively easy.
The robot traffic cannot pass through a gateway, i.e., it won't go out on the Internet, but will get routed through any local area network combination of switches, access points, routers.

The problem you'll likely encounter with a school network is whatever network security measures the administration enforces.
The hardest, possibly insurmountable, part is that the scattered school access points would have to recognize, accept, and connect automatically to the robot bridge.
That means giving the bridge the SSID that the school is actively looking for, and will automatically allow connection to, implementing whatever security IT may require. You'll need to clear this with the IT department and get their active participation.

Is the robot bridge or Driver Station laptop allowed to connect to the school network?
Does connecting to the school network require a login process, like a student id?

P.S.
I know one team had to mount a laptop on their robot to use as a pass-through, so they could logon to the school network.

[jbsmithtx]

That is an incredibly smart way to that. The only problem is a wpa2 passcode, so I will have to see if there is a way we can set up the bridge to provide such. But there isn't any other security measures on our network other then that. This means that the driver station could connect easy enough, but setting the bridge too might be a little difficult

[linuxboy]

At events you may have noticed that you need to switch the DAP-1522 to bridge mode from AP mode. This allows the DAP-1522 to connect to the field access point.
A similar process could be used to connect the DAP-1522 to your school's network with IT approval. In order to program the DAP-1522 I would reset it, and follow the instructions on D-Link's page to set it up in bridge mode (http://www.dlink.com/us/en/support/p...-access-point). It asks for a Revision so you need to know that, this team update describes the difference.

Seems like Mark covered pretty much everything else.

Good luck!
- Oliver

[DavisC]

I do have previous experience with this at my school. The entire thread can be found here (http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=98006). And yea I did the laptop-internet-pass-through; and I thank Mark for all his help when I was attempting to do this.

Page 2 is where it starts to come together, (page 1 might provide some info if you are interested).

2 things to note about the thread. There is a point where I do have it setup with relaxed network security settings (probably what you want) and when I did this I just made a pretend-wifi-network and then tested it at my house.


Then the other thing. This is because my school complicated things.

My school has WPA2 Enterprise security settings (for logging in), so I had to place a laptop onto the robot and under network adapter settings I had to bridge the wired and wireless networks on the laptop settings; this was more to simply create an internet pass-through.

This is to be a fix to have both audio and vid of the robot.

The laptop on the robot idea (stated above) also allowed me to have (from my controlling laptop) a video chat to the computer on the robot so that I had audio and vid (FRC Axis cam didn't work); I think I needed a wired + a wireless connection from the control laptop to do that, and it did not matter for the laptop on the robot to have a specific IP address.

Hope this helps. Let us know how it goes.
Davis C