Wireless router on robot

[daltore]

This is not a question about legality in competition, or for use in competition, or having anything to do with competing in FIRST, my question is if there is a *relatively* simple way of converting the FRC control setup to work with a router on the robot, and the driver station as just a laptop.

We will be getting a couple of control systems this year or next year (whenever the funding finally gets approved from last year), but we first have to figure out how to control the darn things. Instead of buying a $150 router and a $90 bridge for each robot, I'm wondering if there is a way to convert the control system to use a $30 router (the new Frys.com Wireless-N router, I got one today, and I believe it works quite well enough for this purpose) on the robot, and just connect the driver station computer as a client.

Any thoughts on this or alternatives?

[EricVanWyk]

If you aren't concerned with the rules, this is not a problem and is super easy to do.

Simply:
1) Find a way to power the router.
2) Set its IP range to match the 10.TE.AM.x that we're used to.
3) Plug the cRIO into one of the LAN ports on the router (not the WAN).
4) Post your success story on chiefdelphi!

For #1, the answer is likely "just use the dedicated 12V port", but be sure to check what your router is expecting.

You can probably skip #2. Just be sure that the router, the cRIO and the laptop driverstation all agree on an IP range. It is probably easiest to set it up per FRC norm, but certainly not 100% necessary.


We used the WRT54GL with a lot of success, but I'm sure that just about any other wireless router would do just as well.

[Radical Pi]

Most of that would work, but make sure to get a G router. The classmate doesn't do N as far as I know.

[Racer26]

Most N routers do G natively.

[daltore]

You know, that was kind of a "duh!" moment. I forgot that we regularly plug the cRIO directly into the router. This is why I shouldn't write new CD threads late at night.

Anyway, thanks for the response, you're totally right. I think I'll bring this up as our wireless control setup. It will vastly simplify things as there will be no need for a wireless bridge (all of our class laptops have wireless cards), so we'll just need to set up the DHCP on the routers to only accept 10.xx.xx.5 and it should be good to go. This will make our order quite a bit cheaper and easier to manage.

[Racer26]

Yeah, you just need to setup your routers as different teams (perhaps 2158 on your current competition bot, 8512 on a previous bot, or whatever)