WiFi in pits

[DtD]

Only 1024 Bytes are getting transmitted back and forth by the cRIO and Driver Station, I don't think degration will be any problem with Wireless N.

Last year we got WiFi in the area provided by the arena or some other higher-up being, I hope we will again this year, we used it to help keep our sponsors up-to-date!

~DtD

[d235j]

In any case, regular Wi-fi works on the 2.4 GHz radio band, while the robot's radios work on the 5 GHz band. Therefore, there should be no problems. (Cell phones work on the 850 / 1900 MHz band so there shouldn't be problems with that either.)

Of course, this is from a practical point of view; I'm not sure about the rules here.

[Rick Wagner]

My take on the intent of the rule prohibiting "wireless" communication is to prevent the Commander from talking to the Outpost Payload Specialist via walkie talkie headset or to prevent communication between the Commander and a scout in the audience. I don't think it's for technical reasons (interference prevention). That's an FCC concern. My take, not official. It would be nice if there were clarification on Q&A.

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Rick Wagner

My take on the intent of the rule prohibiting "wireless" communication is to prevent the Commander from talking to the Outpost Payload Specialist via walkie talkie headset or to prevent communication between the Commander and a scout in the audience. I don't think it's for technical reasons (interference prevention). That's an FCC concern. My take, not official. It would be nice if there were clarification on Q&A.

Has someone submitted something similar to this on Q&A? This is very important for a stand scouting system my team is working on.

Would it be against the rules to _use_ the 10k Lakes Wi-Fi network for communication?

[PurpleHaze]

Our team is doing something along these lines for scouting, and we been granted permission from the regional we are attending to set up a special wireless network for our project. You should try contacting your regional to see if they can accomodate you.

[SoftwareMentor]

A regional couldn't override the official FIRST rules. There are a gazzilion reasons to allow all the teams to have a wireless network for whatever reasons (scouting, source code management, like from SVN or DARCS, making certain that your girlfriend isn't talking to a nerd from another team - YOU are the only nerd she should talk to, etc.).

There may be concerns that having 100 wireless networks may interfere with the competition. Since the robots were conrolled by RF last year, that may have been the source of the no radio rule. Certainly they knew that cell phones couldn't interfere (I don't know what frequency they were using, but it would have been a violation of law by FIRST to use anything in the cell phone bands).

Not allowing control of the robots by wireless at the competition other than on the field makes lots of sense. It would be easy to interfere with each other and thus lose control of the robots.

Spot WiFi was availble at the Peachtree last year, provided by the venue. Having one or a hundred WiFi networks won't interfere with the competition, assuming that the WiFis don't transmit on the competition frequency and they are managed properly. I can see FIRST prohibiting privat WiFis just for this reason - how can they tell that some team hasn't misconfigured their network? (Well, they could, but that would take extra effort.)

This is all useless speculation. Someone needs to post a well formulated question on the usfirst forum. And we will all need alternatives to having a private WiFi network just in case.

[Nibbles]

Team Update 13:

Section 4 – Robot Transportation
Wireless communication clarification:
Regarding the wireless communication prohibition in Team Update 12, we’d like to clarify that
general cell phone use is permitted. However, Wi-Fi use in the 2.4GHz or 5GHz bands is
prohibited.

FIRST, of course, does have the authority to determine this sort of stuff, but they doesn't micro-manage individual events, and I get the impression the regional committee could rule on it individually, it is just a matter of if FIRST takes corrective action afterward or during if they find out it violated their rule.

[aksimhal]

At the DC Regional, the convention center provides the WiFi, which is about $25 a day...

[keehun]

When we compete at the Minnesota venue (William's Arena) there was the University network (and that's what I used). There should be zero problems and I won't judge with the rules but I guess the easiest thing to do is to ask a regional manager there.

[nathanww]

From a debugging standpoint if no one else is using WiFi then any problems encountered - and there have been a few - and you can immediately eliminate any interference due to improper setup or jamming or other random effects. The bug to chase is localized in the FMS somewhere...

Even if no one is using wifi this would be a very dangerous assumption to make--for one, 802.11n isn't the only thing that uses the 5ghz band. There could also conviveably be electrical noise issues from the robots that affect a lot of frequencies. And finally, if you immediate decide that the problem couldn't be the wifi link because no one's using wifi, you ignore the possibility that either.
1.Someone didn't get the memo--after all, some of these events have thousands of spectators, and not all of them are neccesarily going to know the rules
2.Someone is deliberatley trying to bring down the system by use of a jammer or some wifi-specific attack

[kirtar]

In any case, there's not much that can be done about it, nor do they really do anything. At Buckeye, I turned on Airport (yes, I was using a mac) every so often to see if there were any networks that weren't supposed to exist. In what is probably an a/b/g (maybe not even a) card, I saw 2 networks which existed the whole day and at least 5 others that popped in and out throughout the day, a few of which were named '___ (team number removed) laptop connect.' Nothing was done about it.

[Tom Line]

Originally Posted by kirtar

In any case, there's not much that can be done about it, nor do they really do anything. At Buckeye, I turned on Airport (yes, I was using a mac) every so often to see if there were any networks that weren't supposed to exist. In what is probably an a/b/g (maybe not even a) card, I saw 2 networks which existed the whole day and at least 5 others that popped in and out throughout the day, a few of which were named '___ (team number removed) laptop connect.' Nothing was done about it.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

• Robots may be operated via wireless control only on the competition or practice fields.
• Two-way radios or other form of wireless communications are not allowed (with the
exception of the previous bullet).

Wireless communications, and that includes wifi routers for scoring, laptop to laptop networks, etc. with the exception of cellphones is NOT ALLOWED.

[Protronie]

There were a few dozen people spotted with their lap-tops open and in use in that stands at MWR. I'm not saying they were using wifi but they were on their computers. So how is [i]FIRST[i] going to enforce a no wifi rule?
You can't go around picking up everyones lap-top especially if the person is not a FIRST member. And what about the Blackberries and PDA's?

Have their been any problems yet with a person using wifi interfering with the game field or robots?

-p

[Zflash]

At the Buckeye regional we spoke with team 829 about thier scouting program, which was pretty neat by the way. If I remember correctly they said they teamed up with Purdue FIRST and had someting like 12 people watching matches. These people were somehow tied together and then a final program was compiled for use. It seemed to work for them, maybe someone more familiar with it can explain here?

[jtdowney]

Originally Posted by Zflash

At the Buckeye regional we spoke with team 829 about thier scouting program, which was pretty neat by the way. If I remember correctly they said they teamed up with Purdue FIRST and had someting like 12 people watching matches. These people were somehow tied together and then a final program was compiled for use. It seemed to work for them, maybe someone more familiar with it can explain here?

From my understanding all the Purdue FIRST scouting was done on laptops that were wired together.

As for the wireless rules, I think FIRST is fully aware of the technical issues with using 5Ghz spectrum and the potential for interference from non Wifi devices. I don't think you will see FIRST come down hard and enforce the rule unless someone is caught intentionally interfering with the field system. That does not mean you shouldn't respect the rules set forth by FIRST even if you are technically sure it wouldn't interfere at all.

In the past the FTA would stop by your pit if you were caught using the radio but I didn't hear about that happening at all this week.