Control System Network Settings Conundrum

[RoboMaster]

We have found out some problems and contradictions in the control system network in general. I'd like to set the record straight for how it's really supposed to be set up. Can you help us out?

First of all and long story short, we've been trying to connect to the router wirelessly. It's really helpful because you don't have to be tethered to it and indirectly a wall socket to power the router. Then your battery powered development computer and battery powered driver station can be used anywhere when connecting to the robot. This is possible because we've heard so, plus it has worked a little bit for us in the past and there are even instructions (in the Getting Started control system manual, #2).

One of our student members is an IT techie and with his help we got it working. We set up the wireless network settings on our computers to work with the router. These are basically the same as the wired settings. It worked ok, but we started getting problems and bugs and the whole thing wasn’t perfect since it was done manually. One of the biggest problems was that it wasn’t how FIRST tells us to set it up, so we didn’t know if it would conflict when we went to competitions.

Here’s the contradiction that we think is the issue:
The subnet masks of the different devices needed to be set a certain way, but the FIRST manuals were telling us differently. Our IT techie set them all to 255.255.255.0 (here on referred to as “having one zero/0” since that’s easier and faster to say. That's the way we've said it for simplicity). This is so that they match up with the router subnet mask, which is the same. However, FIRST tells us to set them all to 255.0.0.0 (“having 3 zeroes/0s”). The deal is that you can’t do this for the router because you select the subnet mask from a drop-down list. A 3 zero subnet mask is not an option. FIRST even tells us in the Getting Started manual to use the option with one zero and set everything else to 3 zeros.


So I researched the whole deal, went through the Getting Started manual, found what all the network settings should be for all the devices (IP address, subnet mask, etc), and reset it all back to normal the way FIRST tells us to. I put all this related information in the attached Word document. Then I tried using the instructions they give to set up wireless Classmate-router communication.

We tried it out on the robot. Wireless connection to the router did not work, so we switch to wired, which did. So we have been using wired until we figure this out.


So…
Can anyone explain the subnet mask contradiction? How should the whole thing really be set up? How can we connect to the router successfully?
I have a basic idea of IP addresses and subnet masks after working on the team as a committed programmer and working through all of this. However I don’t know much conceptually, which is exemplified by when I looked up subnet masks on Wikipedia and was swamped with technical terms. So bear with me if I don't understand everything.


Feel free to use my document for your own uses and for understanding this issue. We haven’t used it much on our team since we just made it, but I’d expect it to be a lot better than hunting down the information. We’ll use it to help remember what to set our computers back to after we hook them up to the internet, which requires one to set the network settings to “obtain and IP address automatically.”


Thanks for any and all of your help!!!