Bridge problems!

[Excessum]

Hello all robotics teams! Our team, 4286, is having some problems with the bridge. We are working in a school with I believe 802.11g network, at 2.5ghz. The problem is when you try to connect, it switches between connection and no connection. I have reason to believe this is because of such interference. When I reset it and set it to 5 ghz, it still didn't work, my comptuer couldn't pick it up. My question is should I continue to work on it all night tonight or just wait until we get a new one? (We already have it shipped to us, its jsut not here yet). I am the programming capt if anyone was wondering.

Thanks

-Ex

[Alan Anderson]

Use a program like InSSIDer to scan for wireless networks and show which channels are least likely to interfere with your robot's D-Link router. Log in to the router and configure its wireless settings manually to be on the desired channel instead of letting it select a channel on its own. That usually helps.

[DavidGitz]

Originally Posted by Excessum

my comptuer couldn't pick it up.

This may be an obvious question, but does your computer support 5 GHz?

We had a "scrimmage" event in St Louis on Saturday and with about 20 teams there we were getting very bad wireless interference issues. We have a (I believe) 1 year old laptop that we use for our driver station and it does not support 5 GHz. We tried changing the DLink's channel selection from auto to manual but still had the same issue. By the way, every team had this issue. If you are experiencing a similiar problem your options are to either somehow get the other wireless networks turned off where you are or find a computer that supports 5 GHz, or just run a long ethernet tether cord.

[Jon Stratis]

In case you didn't see it, the team update from 2012-01-20 states:

The DAP-1522 wireless bridge required for competition will not link to FIRST’s field access point if there are more than approximately 60 active access points in the venue.

With your school's wifi on, people standing around with wifi-enabled phones, iPods, laptops, and such, you may be approaching or exceeding that limit locally. You could try to get one of the alternate bridges mentioned in the team update for local testing.