Our router keeps dropping packets. We have tested with 2.4 and 5 gHz and followed FRC router configuration guidelines with the FRC bridge configuration tool and manually. We connected the driver station directly to the cRio which worked. We alos connected the driver station to the router and then that to the cRio, which also worked. We have tested with multiple ethernet cables, computers, routers, and cRios, and also reinstalled wireless drivers. We used a 5gHz dongle which also didn’t work. We have ran out of ideas to fix this problem any help would be appreciated.
How do you know that?
I would guess through the “charts” tab of the driver station application, which displays the number of lost packets, battery voltage, and cRIO CPU usage.
Are you having problems controlling the robot through WiFi? Or, are you just concerned about dropped packets being reported on the charts tab?
I’m inferring from your description that everything is fine until you try to make a wireless connection from your Driver Station computer to the robot. Is that an accurate interpretation?
Are you using the D-Link router on the robot? Where is it mounted? Do you have it far from any causes of interference, like a big chunk of metal or a motor or a speed controller?
The 12v-to-5v converter is a large source of radio interference. It’s convenient and obvious to mount it right against the router itself, but it’s also very very bad.
When trying to connect to the router wireless from the driver station no matter where the router is placed we get communication to the robot and then lose it constantly. The connection is never steady.
Given we are in the same school district, I think I might have an idea ::ouch::
I have heard from the IT techs that they installed quite a few more access points around CHS this past summer and it absolutely flooded our WiFi. We moved to another place in the school and were able to connect just fine. I would guess that it is possible that CV is the same. This was especially true in the shop area.
Find someone that has a WiFi scanner on their phone and have them check the signal strength in the area. I would also try moving the robot to another area in the school (try the Cafeteria) and see if the connection is any more stable.
Good Luck!
Try using a wifi sniffer, such as inSSIDer to figure out how busy your area is.
Essentially our problem is this.
Perfect comm over ethernet, everything works perfectly.
Attempt Wifi connection, nothing. When we try to ping (CMD) either the router, the Crio or the connecting computer we get a response between 50% (best so far) and 0%. That is the percentage of packets that aren’t dropped.
So far, we have
- Bought new routers
- Reconfigured 4 different routers
- Reflashed cRio
- Tried 3 different cRio
- Bought a USB network card that can connect on 5Ghz
We only get comms when the occasional packet gets through, never enough to actually see the robot code light go green (over wifi)\
We have tried pinging 10.9.55.1 (router)
10.9.55.2
10.9.55.5 (computer static ip)
Another note is that our robot from last year, which worked then, no longer works and experiences these same issues over wifi…
We tried 3 different laptops with different wifi cards to no avail… We even bought a Linksys N600 USB adapter, which ususally fixes interference issues and it didn’t help at all.
Help would be appreciated 
We’ve tried the wifi sniffer, and we agree it is flooded… 8 different networks exist at strengths of 30db or stronger across all channels.
This is why we tried the 5ghz band with the wireless usb card. Then we noticed long range comms suck… so we put router and laptop next to each-other. It improved for a bit, then worsened. I also took one of the routers home, and I’ll be playing with it once I finish my homework to see if the comms improved.
Our shop could be pretty noisy actually… We have routers in nearly all the classrooms now and they are arrayed around the shop… I’ll grab a wifi sniffer and take a look in the shop tomorrow, since we only tested it in the classrooms
This happened to us last year, and as others above me have stated, it was due to our wifi being flooded… I wish I had a picture of the rainbow from the scan, it was a mess. It was so bad that our school’s wifi access points were flooding themselves…
Bad enough to where everyone on wifi experienced slow browser loading? I’m pretty sure this is the problem, since it explains why our wifi (phones, tablets and robots) is so slow compared to the actual network speed.
Check with the people who run the school’s networking. It’s possible that there is something enabled that actively tries to shut down what it detects as “rogue” access points.
You might try setting up the robot’s D-Link as a bridge, and connect both it and the Driver Station computer to the school network. Depending on what security is set up, and whether or not you end up on the same school AP, it should work.