So, today at Houston I have been watching matches for Newton and there has been some big issues with the FMS, so much so that they are having to replay matches 7, 10, and 13 as of the last time I heard anything. I was wondering if anyone knows what is going on with the FMS to create the 2 second lag that my team’s drive team spoke of. I was also wondering if this problem is occurring in any of the other sub-divisions at Houston.
Also, sorry for any potential spelling and grammar issues.
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Looked like both alliances in Roebling Q17 suffered from the same issue. Hopefully it’ll be replayed as well.
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There have been consistent latency issues on Roebling for all alliances and all teams. I’ve seen it as bad as 100ms nominal, 500ms peak on our team and many others have reported similar numbers.
After talking to one the FTAs, he said they were aware of the issue, but came off as slightly dismissive because “everyone across the event is experiencing the same issue.”
Edit/Clarification: we don’t stream any cameras to the dashboard. Our bandwidth usage at previous events was less than .25 Mbps according to FMS logs.
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Can confirm latency and packet loss issues on Roebling. The drivers report a 2-3 second delay.
I would check the field’s spectrum analyzer and see what’s going on there if you are a CSA.
I suspect it wasn’t intended to be dismissive. When you get that many people in one room, with 6 fields going and 24 robots connected and communicating with them, and who knows how many hotspots up and running (despite the rules against them), latency happens. If its affecting all of the fields, then there are probably people on top of it, trying to track down hotspots and free up bandwidth, coordinate efforts between the fields, etc - but his focus is on that one field and doing what he can for those teams. It’s not his job to solve the overall problem, which may be why he came off as dismissive.
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Can it really be accounted to interference from other networks when other fields are operating fine? The fields are all pretty much next to eachother…
2/6 mentioned already as having issues, and you’re the first person to indicate that other fields are NOT having issues. Not exactly enough to say one way or the other for this particular event.
That said, I know from talking with FTA’s that similar issues have occurred at champs in the past, and when they do they tend to affect all of the fields. Even if all of them aren’t affected right now, that very well could change as the event goes on and hotspots change their channels.
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It depends on a variety of factors, but fields (usually?) run on different channels, which could experience varying interference.
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Apparently there’s a ton of hotspots at houston right now and they have threatened yellow cards for them but I don’t know any have been given out. Please start giving teams yellow cards for this and announce who is getting them. This is kinda ridiculous.
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Hardest part I imagine is figuring out who is running the hotspot. But I would love if we’d see it happen, I imagine it would only take a couple before the venue was clear of 90% of them.
The stories I hear involve volunteers walking around the stands with portable fluke spectrum analyzers and zeroing in on peoples’ pockets.
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I have this nifty app on my phone called WiFi analyzer. I’m able to see the signal strength to every network. This could be used to find the general area of the hotspot.
I’m pretty sure you can get pretty close to the actual person doing it. Plus it only takes a couple yellow cards before people stop doing it. From the amount of input lag I’ve heard there is it seems basically unplayable and I doubt they’ll replay every single match it happens in so there will be matches decided by input lag. This doesn’t seem fair at all to me.
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The only hotspots in range of Turing that I see are named “----'s iPhone” or tablet or whatever. There were three of them a while ago.
Also what looks like a printer (unsure if this is from a team, it FIRST.
And a hidden network which I assume was the FMS.
I can understand the occasional iPhone with a hotspot as that can be accidentally turned on.
What really bothers me is the hotspot currently named "Triple climb triple climb triple climb triple"
Since that’s obviously intentional.
Rather than yellow cards, they should just take the individuals spectator badge and not allow them back into the event. If the same team ends up as repeat offenders, then yellow card.
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A yellow card which is announced to the whole field would be much more effective at getting others to stop using hotspots imo.
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Only should a team be punished for something one dumb team member does?
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A pretty common theme of the rules is the team gets punished for something one team member does. The driver is the person who get’s a team a G20 card, someone hopping the field wall gets the whole team a card. One person having a hotspot open should affect the whole team if you follow the logic of the game manual.
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Ok no one has said it yet, but “Houston, we have a problem.” Hope this isn’t an issue in Detroit. Good luck to everyone.
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