Back in September, we blogged about a new 6GHz radio that we plan to introduce for the 2025 FIRST ® Robotics Competition Season.
Long story short, we plan to use these radios at the 2024 FIRST ® Championship, assuming we successfully pass decision gates over the next 3 months.
Since September, we have successfully tested these radios at several off-season events. While the testing revealed a few areas for improvement, the radio performance has generally met or exceeded our expectations.
Based on dialogue with FIRST engineering team members, FTAs from the FIRST Championship, the incredible support from Vivid Hosting, and the thoughtful discussions and feedback we’ve heard and read from the community, we feel confident in the ability to use the radios at this event. There are still a few gates that need to be cleared, and we plan to update status on those gates via this blog.
The decision points are:
Order for radios to be used at FIRST Championship due (COMPLETE)
Testing of signal strength of a single radio on the 2024 playing field (COMPLETE)
Testing of 6 radios operating simultaneously on the 2024 playing field standalone (i.e. not on robots)
Testing of 6 radios operating simultaneously on the 2024 playing field while on robots
Training & familiarization with radios for 2024 FIRST Championship FTAs
Delivery of radios for the event
We are currently evaluating testing the radios at an official event prior to the FIRST Championship. If we decide to move forward with that testing, we will update the community and work with the Partner and teams attending that event to ensure a smooth transition and high-quality event experience.
Planning for how these radios will be distributed and supported at the FIRST Championship is in development. More information on these details will be available as the event approaches.
If teams want to plan around potentially having to incorporate the radio into their robot design, teams can find a CAD model of the radio that can be 3D printed, and a part drawing showing overall dimensions on the product webpage.
Our huge thanks to the volunteers who agreed to support this project and to Vivid Hosting for donating the radios that will be used at the event!
Best case scenario, teams are using the best hardware possible on the biggest stage in FIRST and everyone gets a boost from the improved performance.
Worst case scenario, a lot of “feel bad” moments and the Resource Library gets a new evergreen document “2024 Einstein Investigation Report”
Will there be training provided for CSAs and FTAAs on the new radios? I’m excited to see the potential improvements but I think it will be really important to have a large group of volunteers available on load-in day to help teams with the switch and make sure that Limelights don’t get accidentally fried
Would this mean bandwidth changes at Champs? That kind of stuff would drastically alter what teams choose to do in terms of vision.
Not a big fan of FIRST’s decisions to change things at CMP, but at least unlike last season with super charging, this is being presented well ahead of time.
I’m guessing they’re referring to testing 6 radios on the same field, to represent the 6 robots that will be playing, instead of the number of fields at the championship event. (6 robots per field for 6 fields would be 36 simultaneous radios in testing, not 6).
I am not opposed to this, as my experience with the radios at Chezy Champs was good besides one match. We had a match in which our whole alliance experienced input lag normally associated with packet-loss. After the match we check our logs and confirmed that there was significant packet-loss during the match. At or above levels that in pervious competitions, matches have been replayed for. After brining this to the attention of the FTA we were told, “the driver station logs do not reflect accurate information with the new radio.” I hope that this is fixed before champs as the driver station logs have been used for years as evidence of packet-loss.
Great news. Should any issues arise with the new radios it will be great to have the top tier FTAs/FTAAs along with FIRST, NI and Vivid hosting staff available for debuging, rather than having to use phone/stack tag.
I men every team getting a spare feels a little bit overkill. Given everyone is in roughly the same place it seems like they could just have a large quantity at spare parts and hand out extras as needed without requiring as many overall. That would also let them track how fast radios are breaking which could be pretty useful information to have.
My only concern is that teams will continue to fry coprocessors with the turned-on-by-default POE passthrough. I really hope this on-by-default choice is reconsidered - but at least make the dip switches available for teams to set with POE passthrough turned off by default. Burning a laptop or coprocessor because someone did something that used to be safe when you’re 2,000 miles from home would be a nightmare.
It seems logical in terms of implementing the radio for future seasons because the next major step after limited testing is a much larger volume of testing and I think a little over 1000+ matches qualifies as “larger”
@kiettyyyy can you comment on whether or not teams will also receive a spare radio for the event? Us and many others configure two+ radios to have ready to go in our pits/on cart. Even if spares are only available at Spare Parts or pit admin, I think this would set teams up for a bad time, which is all I want to avoid.
Running around Champs for spare parts is the worst in an already stressful environment. We all know getting spares, configuring them, mounting, testing, etc can get pretty hectic at a large venue. If VH is donating spares for each team, I’d feel 200% better about this. (Even if these spares can’t be kept by teams and are returned at the end of the event!)
I’m concerned about this for competitive reasons. Teams that have not had the privilege to have early access to these radios in a low stakes sandbox environment or off season event will be at a large disadvantage as they now only have hours to begin to adopt some of the benefits these radios and bandwidths provide as well as confirm basic functionality with their robot as compared to the weeks/ months some teams have had to make decisions based on the experience they received. If these radios were made available to everyone at kickoff or even the September before their adoption in season that would greatly reduce the gap this early access advantage would provide.
In short, the gap in value between 12 hours and 3-4 months, or even a single off season event is far wider than 3-4 months vs 1 year
Assuming adoption for champs:
If the bandwidth is expanding to a value that is only truly supported with these new radios then adoption at championships is unfair to teams that have not had prior access to the radios
If the bandwidth allowance changes at champs to account for new radios then this is unfair to teams that have not had prior exposure
If bandwidth is limited to the old radios bandwidth even with the new radio adoption then these bandwidths need to be heavily enforced and not just a “oh well no one else was using it so its ok”
