Wifi at St Joseph Event

[Ryan_Todd]

As a CSA (both FRC and FTC) who's spent countless hours wrestling with "the wifi problem" and related issues, I am ECSTATIC about the prospect of having a well-managed public wifi option at any venue, let alone all venues!

There is simply no better way to guarantee that the robots' preferred frequency bands are kept clear, than by providing free wifi outside of those bands. (Not to mention that teams won't need to set up hotspots, burn through their data plans, and cause additional interference whenever they arrive to discover that their firmware is out of date!)

[Richard Wallace]

Originally Posted by Ryan_Todd

[b]As a CSA ... (Not to mention that teams won't need to set up hotspots, burn through their data plans, and cause additional interference whenever they arrive to discover that their firmware is out of date!)

Yes, that was a frustration during robot inspection. The orange hat guys at FiM Week 2 Districts were kept hopping, Thursday night and Friday morning. Free, professionally managed WIFI reduced the strain considerably when the word started to spread that updates were required.

[ATannahill]

I was a CSA this past weekend and the only software I needed to update any team to that is not installed with the driver station is the driver station. What I mean is that if you have installed the driver station you have the PDP, PCM and Talon SRX firmware in C:\Users\Public\Documents\FRC. The roboRIO image is at C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\LabVIEW 2015\project\roboRIO Tool\FRC Images and firmware is at C:\Program Files (x86)\National Instruments\Shared\Firmware\cRIO\76F2.

During the entire weekend the only thing that needed to be be obtained otherwise was the update suite for the 16.0.2 DS which I had and the LRI had on a few flash drives and the radio configuration utility to load the radio firmware, which teams should have done before coming to the competition.

The other points made are still valid, but I wanted to post this information so people don't have to search out an internet connection or create a hotspot to get the files they already have.

[emmabdalton]

Originally Posted by hardcopi

Basically we have $20,000 worth of equipment and a network engineer on-site to make sure everything was configured properly and wouldn't interfere. Actually probably had a lot less interference at St Joe this year because of it. With readily available wifi I saw a lot less hotspots popping up.

Wifi isn't the issue, wifi that is on the same band as the field is. Our Pod was programmed so it didn't touch the field's preferred band. (I'm not a network engineer so I could be misquoting here).

Ultimately we'd love to bundle a pod with each field. This would eliminate the "wifi" issue at every single event.

This should honestly be at every event. Even trying to fix our profiling app was a huge struggle because we couldn't get onto wifi, even though all the tablets had Sourcetree installed and it would have taken no time at all to pull down an update. Also would be great to have for the purpose of transferring match data to our chief strategist in the pits before meetings with alliance partners... Many headaches and heart attacks from the profiling team could be avoided.

[pingfx]

Does anyone know who we should talk to at FRC to try and get this service at every event? Our idea is to provide a "kit" that travels with each field that can be setup by the volunteers that setup each field. We can then remotely optimize the network and provide any pertinent statistics to the school or event coordinator.

If anyone knows who the "right" person to talk to is please let me know and we will work to get this much needed service in place.

-Chris "wifiguy"
cheighway@il2k.net

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by pingfx

Does anyone know who we should talk to at FRC to try and get this service at every event?

You'd need to contact the planning committee for the event. That's who will know the relevant details of the venue.

I'm a little unclear on something -- does this equipment provide an internet connection, or does it have to connect to an existing one?