Introduction to Networking session

[GreyingJay]

I love the idea. I still remember, "back in the day", when the two PCs in my house were standalone and they were easy to understand. Then I learned how to install a 10Base2 network, and it all got more and more complex from there...

Today's society is very familiar with the internet and the top few layers of the OSI model. Most people intuitively understand IP networks from the end-user perspective: I have a device that wants internet access, and I'll connect to a router/AP at home or at school/hotel/Starbucks. They will give me an IP address. Now I can surf.

So when you tell people the FRC robot has a wireless radio and you connect a driver station laptop to that wireless SSID, there's an intuitive understanding of how that works. Where it starts to get fuzzy is where the "FRC model" differs from the typical "consumer of internet services" model. And that's where I would start delving into the content you've proposed, e.g. routers vs APs, IP addresses, subnets, static vs DHCP, etc.

From an FRC point of view, here are a few questions/pitfalls that I've seen come up frequently, at least on my own team:

- why can't I connect to the roborio?
- how do I work with two roborios simultaneously? (comp bot and practice bot - in our case we set up two, completely separate SSIDs but both identically configured)
- I flashed my radio to the competition firmware and now nothing connects
- can I be connected to my robot network and the internet at the same time?
- can I use any old router for my practice/test robot?
- I'm getting a lot of wireless interference/disconnections
- how does FMS work, bandwidth limitations on FMS - does setting up devices behind a Gigabit switch on-board the robot mean those devices on the switch can talk amongst themselves without worrying about bandwidth limits?