VH-109 As An Access Point with an unmanaged switch

Technical
1

vividhosting now says that teams can connect to the VH-109 and use an unmanaged switch to talk to the access point VH-109. other than an image:

image
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there is very little documentation on this. so, a couple of questions:

  1. Has anyone been able to get this working using an unmanaged switch?
  2. did you have to use a specific unmanaged switch or will any giga bit switch work?
  3. if you did get it working, is there a DHCP server (either the AP VH-109 or the robot VH-109)?

thanks,
bill

2

Theres nothing special here. With the radio using Radio Variant firmware, set to AP mode this setup just works. Any unmanaged switch will work.

Note that you don’t need the switch here. You could plug into the DS port, and also the 2 Aux ports on the AP. You also could hook into the LAN port on the PoE adapter, and get a 4th port. So you only need the switch if you either need more then 4 wired devices, or you need them to all be gigabit (Only the DS port on the radio is gigabit).

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3

We have our VH-109 setup in our shop exactly as outlined in that image. We have our DS and multiple programming laptops hooked up to the unmanaged switch.

  1. Yes.
  2. We just used a spare unmanaged switch that we had lying around, no specific requirements.
  3. I know nothing about DHCP, so I can’t help you here.
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4

Yes. You should not need to configure static addresses on either side for this configuration.

(I don’t trust dhcp and prefer static addressing everything on the robot, ymmv)

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5

Same. On 1538’s robots we static EVERYTHING in the event we have some kind of power failure on a device or subsystem.

Ain’t nobody got time to wait for a DHCP offer when a match is only so long.

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a big thanks to everytone that responded, very much appreciated.
given that this setup works and one of the VH-109’s is a dhcp server my plan is to use a wireless router/switch with wifi 5 with it’s dhcp server disabled. we’ll plug the wireless switch into the access point and should then be able to connect to the wireless router and have access to the VH-109 network, and ultimately the roborio. everything is going wireless these days and to have to plug an ethernet cable into this rig for it to work is ridiculous. it appears there was little thought put into making this work for teams when they are not at a competition, very disappointing.

yes, i agree that everything that access the network has a static IP address. but i do not want to have to assign static addresses to the laptops that connect to the robot.

we bought wifi 5 dongles for all of our laptops a few years ago. this allows us to be connected to the robot and the internet at the same time. this allows us to use VS code live share and have multiple students/mentors connected to the robot while also being able to see the code being edited live and help out the students that are programming.

anyway, i’ll reply to this thread on how it works out.

thanks,

bill