One of our team member connected our AP through the 802.3 port to the PoE injector and our AP released fog and broke down. We are waiting for our new AP, but we want to test our car wirelessly during this time. Can we use wireless routers other than the FRC AP to do so?
Theoretically, yes. Some of us recall the much older and larger setups… I don’t know the details but it should be at least theoretically possible.
Once you get to competition you’ll have to have the official one. (A lot of teams tend to have several for just such an emergency, theirs or someone else’s.)
Pre 2015 there were D-Link routers like you would see in your own home.
https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/3120/m/8559/l/544847-manual-radio-configuration
This was also pre RoboRio. I’m not sure what all the Radio Imaging does for the Open mesh radios besides set the team hotspot or FMS mode. In theory it should be possible to use a generic router as your hotspot in the same way.
You need a router that will work in Bridge mode. You need use the voltage that the router is designed for. Likely 12 or 5 volts. Likely will not find one that has passive POE.
Nothing really special about the OP5.
The reason the OP5 uses a locked configuration is the hardware can operate on unauthorized ratio frequencies. So the FCC requires it to be configured not to do that. It is mostly just a generic router.
The short answer is just about any router with proper configuration will work.
More thoroughly: make sure you get something that can be powered by the robot (either 12V or 5V and drawing less than or equal to 2 amps, to ensure it can be powered by the VRM). You’ll also need to configure the DHCP server of the router to assign IP addresses that your roboRIO and Driver Station are expecting; for your team, that’s the 10.69.41.XX subnet.
That’s it. There’s nothing fancy going on with the official FRC radio, it can be replicated by most wireless routers.
This is incorrect; bridge mode is only needed if you’re doing something more complicated like replicating the official field setup. The standard home radio configuration actually puts the OP5 in AP mode, which is what most routers do out of the box and all you need if you’re just connecting a laptop directly to the robot.
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You are correct. We have a field AP on our field. I forget we are not normal. We mostly use static addresses, but if the mDNS working it shouldn’t matter. It takes a bit of effort to make a router assign specific address to specific devices. WPLIB has a pretty good write up
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This is going back a ways, but back in the cRio days (summer 2011) I was slapping random junk routers on demo robots. Worked fine since they all ran on 12v like the original Linksys gaming adapters of 2009-2010 (of which the robots were originally built).
I concur, for non-competition use anything that can accept power on the robot and functions as an AP will suffice.
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