How to Spade and Neuter the Dog

[GGCO]

I posted this on this thread, but I thought that is deserves its own post.

After spending 7 hours working on the robot today, we found a solution to our problems.

First some background:
We heard that the system watchdog issue was cause by communications lag between the driver station and the robot. I know that wireless lag is often caused by interference and other devices using the same channel. We are working in an area that has many other Wi-Fi access points. The Linksys router we got in our kit is not dual band and only operates on the 2.4Ghz frequency. The instructions from FIRST said to set the router channel to Auto. This is bad practice in my opinion. I think it’s better to know your Wi-Fi environment and set a fixed channel accordingly.

How we fixed it:
We used a program called InSSIDer to scan for access points in our area. It gives a nice graph that shows which access points overlap each other. Channels 1, 6, and 11 are the best because they do not overlap. Channel 1 had the least access points so we set our router to use channel 1. After changing the channel we no longer experienced the watchdog issue.

The short version:
Try changing your router wireless router channel to 1, 6 or 11.
- Nate (the great) from Team 3357

We also disabled the watchdog and made sure to kill it in the autonomous() and operatorControl() functions. Hope that helps!

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