Laptop wireless card in Master mode to control robots?

[daltore]

This next year, our robotics program is going to get a few cRIO's and use them for non-competition robots in class, and we're looking for the cheapest ways to control these things wirelessly. I found some very cheap wireless N bridges for the robots, but I was thinking about controlling the network. Our laptops have Dell 1505 wireless cards, which have Draft N capability. If these do have master mode (still looking), would it be possible to just use the laptops to control the individual robots instead of using a router? This would make things significantly cheaper and simpler (well, maybe not simple, but at least a little better).

If you can think of any other alternatives to the DS and a router, let me know. Anything that can tell the FRC version of the cRIO what to do over the airwaves is fine, we just don't quite have the budget to purchase several full control systems.

[Greg McKaskle]

What you need to determine is if the bridges can bridge an ad hoc network. You may be able to determine this from documentation, or you may just want to host the network from a laptop and determine if the bridge configuration will connect to it. It turns out that the gaming adapters in the 2009 KoP will not do this. The will only bridge an infrastructure network.

If you have a router on the robot instead of a bridge, it can host an infrastructure network for the laptop to join. Also keep in mind that N speed is not absolutely necessary for a robot or two to be on the network. G will work fine, even with video until you have a full field.

Greg McKaskle

[daltore]

Good advice, all of it. The specs on the bridge say it supports both Ad-Hoc and infrastructure, and it's designed to either be used as a bridge or an access point connected to a wired router (love this thing already...).

I know we can use wireless G, but the reason I didn't want to was because we're in a small enclosed classroom, which happens to be built like a Faraday cage, with a wireless B/G access point in it already for the school networks, which will be in use on the same laptops for looking up designs/code/etc, and with 20 laptops in the same room, we're pushing it as it is. Wireless N puts us on an entirely different frequency band with more channels, and is not in use anywhere in the school as of now (I believe the access points only support the 2.4 GHz band, not the 5 GHz). It's more of an interference issue, not a speed issue, although having a bunch of wireless N bridges laying around won't be half-bad, either... Not to mention, these things are cheap, so we might as well.

If anyone cares to see, here's the link to the bridges we're looking at.

This brings me to my next question. Now that I'm confident we can get the robots connected directly to the laptop, any ideas on how to get useful driver data from the laptops to the robots? Say, if we plugged in some USB joysticks to the laptop with the hopes of driving the robots around? I know this is more a question for after the 2010 field control system comes out, but we'd like to not have to buy a bunch of DS's.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by daltore

This brings me to my next question. Now that I'm confident we can get the robots connected directly to the laptop, any ideas on how to get useful driver data from the laptops to the robots? Say, if we plugged in some USB joysticks to the laptop with the hopes of driving the robots around? I know this is more a question for after the 2010 field control system comes out, but we'd like to not have to buy a bunch of DS's.

Have you looked at the Virtual DS? http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=75431

[daltore]

Wow, I hadn't seen that before, I guess I just didn't use the right terms in the search engine. But that's awesome! Alright, looks like that'll be our solution if we can get it to work properly. Shouldn't be too hard, since we can still use an ethernet port and a second bridge if we can't get the internal wireless card to cooperate. Really cool program, though! We'll have to try it out with our 2009 robot!

Thanks for your help guys, and if anyone else has any opinions on the matter, please do comment.