After what seemed like hours, the CAGE Match finally got going but they had to use all the teams routers to make it happen. You’ll have to ask the engineer Chris Elston (Team 1501) why this had to happen.
Please do tell more (Chris Elston) or who ever
I found mine 
we had the original FIRST field, yet we had problems communicating with the field. So we decided to use the FMS light program. Nobody in the room had ever used the system before, and we could only connect with one robot with each router, not all 6 robots with one like it should have been. So we had each team bring up there own router, and we linked them all together and left them all hooked up at one time. a total of 18 different home wireless networks, with absolutely no interference. it was amazing once everyone had gotten everything synced the first time.
Exactly why you write your team number on pretty much everything.
if you had to use a wrt610n for each team that participated something tells me you overlooked a setting in the one and only router you should have needed unless FIRST messed up on any new FMS Light updates they put out (seeing how I haven’t messed with the program in months). finds it amazing and odd that this alternate setup worked def. thumbs up on the creativity!
Teams had already been forced to reconfigure their robot radios twice. It was marginally less disruptive to connect up all the routers than to make yet more unfamiliar (and untested) changes to all the WGAs. As a bonus, everything will still work without further reconfiguration when the teams get home.
we originally had encrypted all of the radios for the FRC field…but when we realized we had to use individual routers we had to remove all of the encryption keys.
Also with the using of FMS light everyone had to use dongles. It was a very complicated system that teams had to get into the swing of, however, the teams got the hang of it and the competition finally ran smoothly.
I think the text on the monitor in the background says it all :rolleyes:
Also looks like a “Don’t try this at home, kids!” with the power strips…
Reposting this for great truth. This goes double for college kids, I swear Kettering’s dorms are a fire hazard.
(I debated doing this in Thunder Chicken Green but decided against it for your viewing pleasure)
And I was complaining at the Deer Park Invitational this weekend, because one of my switches was bad (during field setup)…
This makes me feel much better:yikes:
Man, now I KNOW I’m really “Old School” This is what I first thought of before I read the first post.
Sorry…wrong kind of router.
http://i688.photobucket.com/albums/vv250/Brian_C_photos/router3.jpg
As others have said, we had to use FMS Lite to run the field. BTW, you need an internet connection to get FMS Lite installed for the first time…learned that the hard way too.
What happened to us is everyone of course had their routers set for fixed IP like they are suppose to based on the FIRST recommended IP format. I.E. our number 1501 was
10.15.1.2 for the router.
829 was:
10.8.29.2 etc, etc…you get the picture.
Well the problem with this and FMS Lite is everyone needs to be in the same SUB NET…
Will Laws actually caught the fact we are using the “wrt610n” routers that are classified as “home networking” devices and they don’t allow you to change the subnet. It’s a pull down box in the router configuration screen 255.255.255.0 was our only choice of a few fixed pull down box choices.
So this was a BIG problem…instead of going into the team radios one more time changing the IP address wasting more time… we decided to try and setup 18 home networks and FMS Lite communicated ok with all of them because we was able to configure the NIC card in the computer to 255.0.0.0 sub net mask.
I am just amazed we had power strips, about 20 CAT5 patch cables on hand to daisy chain them all together, and nearly everyone brought their router. That was amazing too.
It was an interesting problem to over come and trying to decide what to do, so we ran with leaving the IP address alone, and setting all the routers up as is because by this time we had consumed about 3-4 hours of the morning trying to fix the field computer. What was interesting and not mentioned is within our group, we multi-tasked the problem.
Mark was working Plan “A”.
Brett was working Plan “B”
Chris and Samir was working Plan “C”.
Will was working A,B, and C.
We didn’t just work on them one at a time, we efficiently worked on all of them simultaneously, we ran wires to routers, obtained and scrounged routers from Hugh’s team Red Alert, amazed Hugh had two switches on-site we could use.
I couldn’t believe it actually worked. I have never in my life seen anything like it. It’s not text book or anything like that it doesn’t have to be and people could stand here now and pick it all apart, but the point of this whole ordeal is there was a problem to overcome: Will Laws, Samir Shaikh, Brett Heininger, Mark Koors, Andy Baker, Hugh Myers and myself all worked together to come up with a solution to the problem. It didn’t matter what it looked like, it was just neat to experience the dynamics of problem solving with six other strange people you’ve never worked with before and to produce a fix like that is something Will, Samir and Brett (students) will never forget. I am happy to be apart of something that was surely very stressful, but the amount of team work, inspiration and our ability to learn from each other was something even myself will cherish. Those are the experiences in FIRST that you want to cherish and never forget later in life. Every FIRST robotics team desires to solve problems and work together no matter the circumstances. This was certainly no exception and we wasn’t even building a robot.
Fire hazard? Sure it was. About 500 pair of eyes looking over you’re shoulder for 3 hours and that was the last thing on our mind, we just wanted to see robots move.
Being innovative is how to survive this down economy. Big companies need to think of ways that are outside the box and may break a few rules along the way, but certainly if they can jump the rut, good things will come out of this recession. Look back at innovations that occurred during the great depression. The great depression spurred an amazing period of creativity. Rules were broken to obtain innovation.
Have you thought outside the box lately? I’ve made some new friends for life through this weekend’s journey. It was a pleasure to work with them all.
Chris Elston
Interesting topology 
We should document in a thread or white papers all the different ways people have setup to run off-season events. We kept our field system at Deer Park separated from our scoring system, but that’s as odd as we got. Just a wimpy pair of switches and one dinky router. I feel so out-pimped…
Any comments from Mark Koors about what the full FMS problems/symptoms were?
Such uncertainty makes me want to bring my cardboard box of FMS Lite parts along to our regional as a backup system. Paper team numbers aren’t as flashy for spectators though…
What were plans B & C?
This definitely was interesting. I agree with Chris, friends were made this weekend. We went to battle against a bug that is still unknown, and eventually came out of it with some successes.
With only 5 hours of setup time on Friday night, we had a few things to complete Saturday morning. We did not really know the scope of our problem until 9 or 9:30 Saturday morning. Between 7 and 9, most of us were focusing on getting WPA encryption stuff done with the attending robots. Then, we realized that Mark could not get the regular field management system to work. Mark was working on this “plan A”: getting the regular field management system to work.
Plan A: Mark thinks that the problem is that the Allen-Bradley controller inside of the maroon Scorpion box was not communicating with the server as it should, and therefore the scoring table indicator light tower did not turn on at all. We still tried to run a match this way, but no robots could be activated. He and Chris tried to debug this for a long time while other plans were being worked.
Plan B: Brett and Samir were trying to get FMS Lite working, beginning at 9:30, when we started realizing that Plan A may not be fixed. Learning FMS Lite on the fly, with limited to no internet connection, with 500 people waiting for you was indeed pressure-packed.
Plan C: Two methods of routing signals to and from the robots were being worked, in order to get FMS Lite to work. We tried one router at first, then 6 routers, then 18. 6 worked, but involved switching out routers for each match. 18 worked better, and that picture at the beginning of this thread shows.
Plan D (A, B, C?): Throughout this whole time, I was claiming that lack of internet connection to the main field system server could be the problem. So, Will was working that issue by using Scott Miller’s Verizon card and setting up a bridge from a laptop to the server. Will also helped loads with getting the final 18 routers working in plan C.
Even though this was a crappy situation, with 18 teams waiting for matches to start, I do recall having an interesting conversation with Chris Elston. We both noticed that these three young men (Samir, Brett, Will) and other young FIRSTers were all pitching in … doing REAL WORK to help this situation become fixed. During this process it didn’t really matter who you were, but if you had any know-how regarding networking systems, you jumped in and helped. I really felt helpless, since I know very little about these things.
Around noon, Mike Taylor (the main guy in charge of the event) mentioned to me that teams may want a refund. No one mentioned this to him, but we could tell that teams were frustrated.
Around 12:30, FMS Lite and the router system (Plans B and C) finally got fixed and we began running matches back to back. Relief set in, but we still realized that we had no fair way to run qualifications and rankings. So, a couple of decisions were made:
Mike Taylor and Scott Miller decided that a random draw for alliance captains was a fair as we could get.
Mark Koors and I decided to provide a $300 credit for AndyMark products, available for all 18 attending teams.
I made the $300 credit announcement, claiming that Mark and I are accountable for this system at this event, and we want to express our apology for not getting things working properly. We also realize that these Indiana teams are our teams we depend on the most, and they have been supportive of our company since the beginning of our company. This announcement helped bring relief to the event, and the rest of the day went well.
The Scorpion box is being sent back to FIRST to be checked out. There may be something simple that is unplugged or wiggled free… or it may be something else. We are all smarter now.
Andy B.
Just so everyone knows, that insane(ly awesome) setup isn’t required for running FMSLite. While it is true that the router can’t have its subnet mask set to 255.0.0.0, it doesn’t matter. The only time that comes into play is if the connected computers think that they need to route their packets though a gateway to another network (i.e. the subnet mask on the computer/robot NIC is set to 255.255.255.0). Only then will the routing fuctions of the router be called upon. Basically with the FMS setup the “router” is acting merely as a switch and wireless AP.
Having said that I know first hand what its like to be in that situation. Last year we ran into problems with the team 537 open house practice/competition and the new control system (and we were already behind schedule). We ended up running the whole thing on wireless-G without the WRT610N. It is surprising you didn’t have any issues with interference running that many WAPs so close together.
Indeed. Things like this are the most fun you can have, but only in retrospect. While they’re happening it’s stressful and not fun at all.
OK, here it was a FRC offseason match, and had it not been solved, nobody would have died.
**Kids, **in the real world, sometimes you have to work the problem, and sometimes lives are on the line (Think Apollo 13). The point is, get the broadest, best education you can. Knowing something about a lot of things, while at the same time knowing a lot about some things, will serve you well in life. Be fearless in your exploration. And, learn to collaborate, 'cause it works.
At CalGames 2009, we used the FRC radio config program by James Kiefer to set up the WGAs with a single encryption key used by all participating teams (one they did not know). We then set the WGA to a single ssid by hand after using the setup program, the ssid would otherwise be set to the team number by the setup program. It would have been nice if the setup program had the capability to set a single ssid for all game adapters.
A single team router was then configured with the encryption key, and appropriate other settings, and we were in business using the one router for the field. We didn’t use the dongles, distributing 12 volt power and global control of the disable/enable line that also wired in e-stop switches at each driver station via the competition port. Robots were “enabled” if a master switch was thrown on the scoring table and the e-stop was not latched down, but the match was controlled with FMSLight. Sadly, it appears that this customized portion of the system will not be useful next year with the new drivers station. Such is life…
The one thing that we had a problem with was the 3600 second time out for the key rotation. Once, during a match, all the robots stalled for a second while the key was apparently being rotated. We should have set the timeout so that it would not happen during the day of matches. The other key rotations must have occurred during times that matches were not in play.
Eugene
I had this freeze happen once in the middle of a match, but I wasn’t using keys and ran with security disabled, trusting to the unique SSID and a network monitor saving a log. I knew everyone with a laptop though and was confident iof their integrity, an advantage of a home event.
I really wanted to wire my own field dongles, as that issue adversely affected three teams during the day.
I just didn’t have time, and wasn’t sure if the field already shipped with anything like that.