Hi Kiet,
Question is there any documentation on setting up the AP for the radios to the field?
Thanks
Do we have an update on when the VH-113 will be available to be bought?
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Soon!
We just received the first batch yesterday. We’re performing some conformity testing to make sure that the ones off the factory line meet all of our RF performance requirements.
This first batch will be going out to FIRST and other offseasons that have previously requested them. Shortly after, the remainder and the additional batches will be available at WCP.
The ones from this batch will be used at Cheezy Champs and Chesapeake Robotics Icebreaker this weekend.
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I for one will miss gamepieces flying halfway across the field when shot into the air:
Hopefully the tent and “just inside the door” interpretations hold up with further discussion with counsel.
It would be nice if the router supported 5ghz. There are many situations where we might be outdoors but have a fairly crowded 2.4Ghz spectrum (think demos), though I’m not knowledgeable enough to know how much better 5Ghz is in terms of connection reliability. Maybe one of the 2.4Ghz channels could be converted with a future hardware revision?
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i think this was in a post but i cant find it, but somewhere it was said that “the qualcomm SoC had 2.4ghz built in, so it was easy to design with 2.4ghz and an additional chip to do 6ghz. adding 5ghz would add more complexity and require more space and cooling.”
This is what you’re referring to.
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Maybe one day. We’ve donated quite a bit of money to make this happen. We’d effectively have to start over to make this a thing.
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I was at the Chesapeake Robotics Icebreaker as a CSA, and from my perspective, these radios have been a breath of fresh air. I don’t know exact numbers but most teams at the event were using loaner radios, and were able to get them mounted without much trouble. We had two that didn’t seem to flash properly, but worked after reloading firmware and reprogramming. As far as I know, we did one radio swap across 28 teams, and the root cause there turned out to be a (incredibly cursed) RoboRIO problem rather than a radio problem. The weidmullers for the power connection have been way more reliable than the barrel jacks on the openmesh, and I think if teams are designing for the VH-109 rather than retrofitting it into existing networking setups, it’ll also prove more reliable power-wise than a lot of the random ethernet switches that are being used right now. The VH-109s do get a little warm, but I don’t think any disconnects were attributed to the radio overheating. Also with the 6ghz band, there’s no weirdness with other wifi networks, and we were able to use the school’s wifi to read the impressively comprehensive radio documentation without any trouble for the field. Overall a great experience compared to where we were a year ago.
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Tagging onto this - Kiet reported zero radio failures at Chezy, which I believe.
We thought we had a radio failure in our final qual match, but actually we lost a cell in the battery under impact*. Our main power bus resistance read 120Ohm, which we traced back to the radio fused circuit, and started swapping the radio… Which did nothing. Turns out, Because the radio bridges incoming power on the weidmullers back to the roboRIO poe input port, we were actually measuring the resistance of the filter caps inside the Rio Ethernet port. When we unplugged the Rio Ethernet port, we came back up to 4kOhm.
Measuring several other robots, we found 2x ~4kOhm and 1x 500Ohm. At least one of the 4kOhm robots was using the orange Rev cable to power the radio, which does isolate the Rio from battery voltage. Kiet noted two failures of those orange cables this weekend. We will probably build custom Ethernet cables to isolate the Vbatt from the Rio moving forward.
*We verified the battery is “dead-dead” (open circuit 10.5v, can’t run a battery beak much less a robot) this afternoon after leaving it on a charger all night
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