Wireless Router to Connect with Driver Station

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

If you have someone who knows a little about wireless networking and can spend some time reconfiguring the router and the wireless bridge (generic name for the gaming adapter) that you buy, you might be able to get a cheaper one with less features....

If you're really savy, I would recommend getting a router and installing custom firmware like dd-wrt that can make it act as a wireless bridge

I can confirm that this approach would work perfectly.

My son was moving off to college and didn't want to spend the ~$100 needed to buy a gaming adapter for his X-Box360. I was already running two Linksys WRT54g routers in home, both re-flashed with dd-wrt . One was configured as a standard wireless router, the other as a Repeater-Bridge in my garage. We re-configured the second unit as a client-bridge and Bingo, for $65 we had a fully functional, stable (and signal boosted) gaming adapter.

Now, would I recommend this for a robot?? You bet! Just make sure you understand what you are doing.

[Happyisgood]

Thanks for all the input. I'm actually afraid as anything to even hook up the cRIO for fear of breaking it or blowing it out in some way. I'm going to use a different router, but I'll be using the recommended bridge. Thanks for all your input.

[Greg McKaskle]

If you are being serious, then I'd like to point that it will be difficult to build a robot without being able to connect things to the cRIO. The more you learn about how it works, the more comfortable you will be with it.

The good news is that the cRIO is pretty protected, and you can treat it like almost any other household electrical device -- no liquids, no metal shavings, don't stick things into outlets, etc.

Greg McKaskle

[Happyisgood]

We're getting the cRIO to start working with tonight, we also put the purchace in for the driverstation and some breakers for the PDBoard. We're buying the wireless bridge from TigerDirect. Any clue why nobody's selling the bridge anymore? Thanks for the advice about the cRIO, we know how to use it, but it's going to be a fun learning curve for me in the way of programming. Anybody have any suggestions of some idiot-proof tutorials on LabVIEW for FRC?

By the way, for reference, I'm going to use last years AirPORT Extreme Base Station as my router, the Linksys Bridge as my wireless and a Toshiba Satelite as the main computer.

[Russ Beavis]

For LabVIEW training, check out http://www.ni.com/first. Also, I've heard nothing but great comments about http://www.lvmastery.com.

Russ