Axis camera IP changes during the game

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

[minor rant]

It's very unfortunate that using static IPs is has become obfuscated. It pretty much cost us the first 3/4 of our first event as I stupidly believed that static IPs wouldn't work and/or were against the rules. It would be nice if the documentation was explicit, or at least it said somewhere that it is okay to do it if you follow these guidelines.

[/minor rant]

It's documented in this years documentation. http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...g-at-the-event

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

For those without past years' documentation, here it is:

Set roboRIO to 10.xx.yy.2
Set driver station to 10.xx.yy.5
Set camera 1 to 10.xx.yy.11
Set camera 2 to 10.xx.yy.12

(where xx.yy is your team number, so 2112's roboRIO would be 10.21.12.2 and team 51's would be 10.00.51.2).

As documented at the link above, the driver station netmask must be 255.0.0.0 or else it won't connect to FMS.

[mwtidd]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

It's documented in this years documentation. http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...g-at-the-event



As documented at the link above, the driver station netmask must be 255.0.0.0 or else it won't connect to FMS.

Another important thing to note is that if you specify a the default gateways as 10.TE.AM.1 it appears that all traffic goes to the fms. This caused for significant delays to be introduced only when we connected to the field as data was being passed from the Rio to the FMS, then from the FMS to the Kangaroo, then from the Kangaroo to the FMS, and finally from the FMS to the Rio. In reality it was probably also going through the Driver Station as the FMS does not connect directly to the robot, but short of doing a traceroute I couldn't tell you definitively.

In reality this traffic should have been able to stay local and should not have been subject to the bandwidth limitations the FMS imposes.

In windows you can leave that gateway empty and be all right. On the rio, it can be configured via the web dashboard and should probably be set to 0.0.0.0 as suggested by the images in the screensteps document you listed.

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

It's documented in this years documentation. http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...g-at-the-event

Thanks for the info, but this shows a flaw in this year's documentation. For some reason I was never able to find that. When I go to the control system page, the only link I get is http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...rio-networking, which makes no mention of static IPs, nor does it provide a link to the page that you linked. The only options listed on this page is the mDNS option.

[ATannahill]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

Thanks for the info, but this shows a flaw in this year's documentation. For some reason I was never able to find that. When I go to the control system page, the only link I get is http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...rio-networking, which makes no mention of static IPs, nor does it provide a link to the page that you linked. The only options listed on this page is the mDNS option.

What did you search? I went to http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485 and searched for "static IP" and the first result gave me the necessary information.

What would make this information easier for you to find?

[Chris Hibner]

Originally Posted by rtfgnow

What did you search? I went to http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485 and searched for "static IP" and the first result gave me the necessary information.

I didn't search. In my world of systems engineering words like "will" and "shall" are requirements. The document that I linked to has "will"s spread throughout it, and in my ingrained mind I viewed those as requirements on the system. Why would I search when the requirements were so clear?

What would make this information easier for you to find?

Was this sarcastic?

The answer is pretty simple. Put a link to it on the roboRIO networking page, along with some words along the lines of "Static IPs are also acceptable for more information see (insert link here)." I would think that all things roboRIO networking should be in or linked from the page named "roboRIO Networking". That's documentation 101.

[ATannahill]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

Was this sarcastic?

Not at all. I will admit there is plenty of documentation in FRC that is hard to find and many people do not know about. I have met teams that did not know about screensteps. It is a big problem that I don't know how to solve. I have reviewed the screensteps each year and I have sent in suggestions about improvements in the past. If you have an idea of how to make the system better please post it or send it to FIRST. You can send your suggestion about the static IP documentation using the report error (I know error might be a bit of an exaggeration) at the bottom of the page.

[Chris Hibner]

I just saw the page update (http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...rio-networking) - thanks for that - you guys rock!

The interesting thing about today's back-and-forth between Alex and I perhaps shows a bit of a generational difference (I hate to admit it, but I'm getting old). I have a related story here...

At my position at work I'm responsible for a large software package similar to the FRC control system*. I'm also responsible for all of the support that goes along with it. We recently decided to help improve our support position (actually improve our overall position by being able to spend more time developing software via reducing the amount of time we have to spend on support) by studying our support requests and upgrading our base documentation and creating an interactive help website.

When creating the new website I was all about the linking. One of the young guys in the group told me, "who cares, I just immediately go to the search feature." I initially wrote that off as two different styles of doing things.

After getting feedback on the site from many people, I finally noticed the trend that the old guys were all about having good links while the young guys were all about the search feature. I have some theories as to why that is, but I guess the important lesson was that different people approach things in different ways. This shouldn't have been a surprise to me - I recently wrote a long post on the important of diversity on a development team for this very reason. If you don't have people on your team to expose the different ways of thinking about problems, you're unlikely to uncover all of the use cases for your product (please don't read anything into that statement regarding the developers of the FRC docs - I just wanted to bring up a real-world example to support my earlier post in the other thread).

Anyway, thanks for listening. You guys have a great future ahead of you. Especially after putting up with an old crotchety guy like me.

* http://pi-innovo.com/product/