pic: Has anyone seen my teams router?!?!?!?

[DonRotolo]

Originally Posted by Chris_Elston

What was interesting and not mentioned is within our group, we multi-tasked the problem.

Indeed. Things like this are the most fun you can have, but only in retrospect. While they're happening it's stressful and not fun at all.

OK, here it was a FRC offseason match, and had it not been solved, nobody would have died.

Kids, in the real world, sometimes you have to work the problem, and sometimes lives are on the line (Think Apollo 13). The point is, get the broadest, best education you can. Knowing something about a lot of things, while at the same time knowing a lot about some things, will serve you well in life. Be fearless in your exploration. And, learn to collaborate, 'cause it works.

[eugenebrooks]

At CalGames 2009, we used the FRC radio config program by James Kiefer to set up the WGAs with a single encryption key used by all participating teams (one they did not know). We then set the WGA to a single ssid by hand after using the setup program, the ssid would otherwise be set to the team number by the setup program. It would have been nice if the setup program had the capability to set a single ssid for all game adapters.

A single team router was then configured with the encryption key, and appropriate other settings, and we were in business using the one router for the field. We didn't use the dongles, distributing 12 volt power and global control of the disable/enable line that also wired in e-stop switches at each driver station via the competition port. Robots were "enabled" if a master switch was thrown on the scoring table and the e-stop was not latched down, but the match was controlled with FMSLight. Sadly, it appears that this customized portion of the system will not be useful next year with the new drivers station. Such is life...

The one thing that we had a problem with was the 3600 second time out for the key rotation. Once, during a match, all the robots stalled for a second while the key was apparently being rotated. We should have set the timeout so that it would not happen during the day of matches. The other key rotations must have occurred during times that matches were not in play.

Eugene

[Mark McLeod]

I had this freeze happen once in the middle of a match, but I wasn't using keys and ran with security disabled, trusting to the unique SSID and a network monitor saving a log. I knew everyone with a laptop though and was confident iof their integrity, an advantage of a home event.

Originally Posted by eugenebrooks

The one thing that we had a problem with was the 3600 second time out for the key rotation. Once, during a match, all the robots stalled for a second while the key was apparently being rotated.

I really wanted to wire my own field dongles, as that issue adversely affected three teams during the day.
I just didn't have time, and wasn't sure if the field already shipped with anything like that.

[Kingofl337]

All the local events here using FMSLite had a single router and the PC subnet set to 255.0.0.0. The WGAs were set to the same SSID, some events used WPA and some did not.