Can the Driver Station be configured to connect to IP address besides 10.x.x.1?

[Mark_Yedinak]

I was working with a team that has multiple robots who would like to keep their costs down by using a single router for all their robots. In addition, this team hosts many work shops and helps out other teams so it could be useful if they could support more than a single robot. Is the source code for the controller stattion available? It would be a very simple modification to allow it to select the IP address of the robot it will communicate with. The router itself would prevent a team from connecting to robots other teams robots since they will be on a different subnet. I can see where it would be very cost effective for teams to be able to use a single router to support multiple robots.

[sciencewhiz]

Set each driver station to a seperate team number and it should work. We've run 3 robots from the same router. http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=11405

[NI-Bob]

Hello,

Sciencewhiz is again on the ball!! This is by far the best solution for you.  The last thing we would want to do is make changes to your Driver Station before competition.  Using Sciencewhiz's recommendation you should be able to communicate with any robot that you wish to communicate.

The nice thing about this year is that you can install the Driver Station application on multiple PCs.  This means that you can run multiple robots at the same time as opposed to last year when you only had one blue driver station.

If you have any further questions please just let us know.  I hope this helps!  Have a great day!

Thanks!

Bob H

NI FIRST Support

[Mark_Yedinak]

I would assume then that all of the driver stations and robots would remain their respective IP addresses (.5 for the DS, .1 for the bridge, .2 for the cRio, etc.) when using this configuration. I can see where it would be useful to allow all the teams robots to remain on the subnet represented by their team number rather than selecting random team numbers. Although the SSID of the router would ensure that the robots with the fictious team numbers only communicate with the correct router.

[NI-Bob]

Hello Mark,

The simple solution and the one I will recommend is that you would need to use multiple wireless routers.  One configured with each team number.

Technically there could be a way to communicate with 4 robots and one wireless router by changing the network settings of the router to ensure that each are contained in the same subnet (set the subnet mask of the wireless router to 255.0.0.0).  This will allow you to plug in up to 4 PCs into the wireless router to act as the 4 driver stations that you would need.  I have not tested out this behavior before and I will not say that this would be completely supported as it is not typical competition use.  That being said I personally would be willing to try to answer any questions that you may have along these lines.

Either way you would not be changing the network configuration of the robots, radios, or the driver stations.

I hope this helps!  Feel free to let me know if there is anything else that I can do for you.

Thanks!

Bob H

NI FIRST Support

[Mark_Yedinak]

Actually the configuration would need to be "custom" for a team trying to communicate with multiple robots using a single router. Let's assume we have a single team that has multiple robots and their assigned team number is 1234. They have one of two options for sharing their router with multiple driver stations and robots. Either they can assign dummy team numbers to all but one of their robots which would beconfigured with their assigned team number. This solution will work using the subnet mask of 255.0.0.0. The alternative would be to allow all of their robots to use the 10.12.34.x subnet. This would require some management of addresses as each robot. Each would need to have a unique IP address on the subnet. You could easily say that each robot/bridge pair would be configured with .1 and .2 for the first robot, .11 and .12 for the second, .21 and .22 for the third and so on. The drive stations can be assigned any address since I don't believe the robot/bridge ever try to initiate communication with the drive station. I assume that all communication is initiated from the drive station. This solution would require that the drive station be modified to allow the selection of the robot you wish to control. This second solution (when using the 255.0.0.0 subnet) would allow teams to work together for practice scrimmages or workshops and be able to share a single router. With the addition of a very low cost switch you can connect more than 4 driver stations to the system. This would require the ESSID of the visiting robots to be modified but that would be the ony reconfiguration required. The home team would be able to have all of their robots functional on their system at all times.

I think it is important to consider cost for the teams. A single router can easily be used for all their robots. It is not practical to require that they purchase a router for each robot. As teams compete from year to year they can increase their inventory of parts for building robots and may wish to build multiple robots such as a practice robot and the competition robot. They are already burdened with the costs for the controllers, motors, and parts for multiple robots. Why should they have to also incur the cost of additional routers when it would be rather easy to allow them to share a single router. Every bit of savings helps.

Then again what I propose may be a little complicated for some teams. I forget that spend all day deeply immersed in networks and what I consider easy or basic is rather complex for the average non-networking person. I also feel a bit embarassed I didn't consider the fact that the addresses were Class A addresses which allows use of multiple team numbers as part of the addressing scheme.

[NI-Bob]

Hello,

Sorry my post wasn't quite clear.  The situation I was describing was to use dummy team names for the extra robots that you are using.  If it were me, this would be the process that I would choose.

It sounds like you and I are on the same page.  I completely understand that getting multiple routers is not the best economical option but you hit the nail on the head that setting up a custom network configuration may be a little too complicated for the average team.

In the end you are welcome to attempt custom configurations but keep in mind that for any FIRST Competitions you will need to make sure that the configuration matches that in the Control Systems Manual.  If it is not set up properly you will have to address that on your first day before you are able to complete.

I hope this helps!

Thanks!
Bob H

NI FIRST Support