[FRC Blog] Radio Silence

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by tjf

The main problem, for me at least, is that the radio takes 90 seconds to boot... If they're working together on a custom FRC firmware why not make one that just boots faster and disabled unneeded features?

I don't think I ever saw one take more than 60 seconds. 45-50 seconds was more typical. The rest of the delay some people are noticing is from the Driver Station sometimes taking upwards of 20 seconds to establish communication once the network connection is there. That appears to be a Windows networking thing.


It's my understanding that the bulk of the OM5-AP bootup time is in loading and initializing the built-in web server interface to the device settings. If that were removed from the firmware package, it could probably boot in less than 30 seconds. It would also take away a lot of flexibility for teams to tweak their network setup.

Given a couple of years with the same radio, I expect that the bootup time could be drastically slashed while providing teams with the appropriate tools to configure the device. That's probably not going to happen this year, though.