i’m interested in making an FMS-like setup for home use, essentially the network part of FMS without the scoring, buttons, etc, so that our “practice” network setup is as similar to “comp” setup as possible.
does anyone have any advice for that? we could use Cheesy Arena Lite, I think, maybe running on some small dedicated thing (pi? NUC?), with some switches for enablement. i’d like to avoid a VLAN-capable switch if i could avoid it. any advice on AP’s? use the 109/113? some linksys thing? something else?
It kind of depends on how far you want to go. You realistically have 3 options.
Just run a VH-109 with normal firmware but set to AP mode, and another VH-109 on the robot. This won’t require a VLAN switch. This will give you the same radio setup as the field, in addition to the same control paths (Note the FMS never talks to the robot directly. It only talks to the DS). This configuration will have neither the bandwidth limits or the firewalls enabled (Due to VH not giving us the ability to configure these.)
Use a VH-109 with the Practice mode firmware. This will require a VLAN switch, but does not require an FMS. This will gain you the Bandwidth limit (as iirc that FW has the bandwidth enabled), but still won’t gain you the firewall. You can use a cheap VLAN switch for this, I’ve used a TL-SG108E for this, it works well.
Use a VH-109 with the Offseason FW. This will both require a VLAN switch and an FMS setup (This also requires either a DHCP enabled switch, or DHCP servers running on each VLAN on the FMS). Something like Cheesy Arena works for this, I’m not sure if Cheesy Arena Lite has been updated to support the VH radio. This setup will enable both the BW limit and the firewall. Due to the firewall, and the firewall matching the field configuration, having an FMS will be required for any connection, as on field setups the DS is unable to connect to the robot without also being connected to the FMS.
Realistically, the Firewall doesn’t actually change much. So the best recommendation for getting as close to the network setup on the real field is Option 2. That gets you the BW limit, and still enables hooking up an FMS if you want, but its not a hard requirement, unlike option 3. The communication paths are basically identical here as on the real field.
excellent, thank you for the input. sounds like option 2 would be a great place to start. when you say “practice mode firmware” do you mean the “AP firmware” mentioned here
?
is the FMS itself involved in the DS heartbeat disconnect logic? or does the FMS somehow add latency that would reduce the effective heartbeat latency margin? we struggled with disconnects using Cheesy Arena yesterday, and I’d like to understand that better. the absolute worst thing for our program is comp-day problems that the kids can’t do anything about (and I can’t either!)
The FMS isn’t involved with Robot communication at all. It knows nothing about the robot, and no robot communication traffic flows through the FMS software itself. Any extra latency would be caused by the network, which option 2 would be basically an exact match, except for the switches used. But if a switch was adding that much latency, every team would be seeing that.
For radio FW, theres an offseason and a practice firmware listed on the firmware page, with some more docs on what those mean.
I would recommend reading this thread, you can just ignore the stuff where we talk about the CA machine (if you’ll to the same steps and just not connect the FMS leptop it will work as described in option 2).
I have learned a lot from this thread, so if you have any questions about connecting it all together I’d love to help
Thinking about this a little more, if we use a golden driver station for practice (i.e. Windows 11, NI FRC Game Tools, nothing else), then we’ll have to have a way to also connect a programmer laptop to the same robot. to do that, we’d remap the VLAN ports, e.g. using the TL-SG108E web UI, right?
Yep! We’re currently working on a release that adds in 2.4 GHz SSIDs for convenience on the practice AP firmware as well… This will allow for programming/debug laptops to connect up over the air.