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Not sure if this is the place for this, but...
I cant be the first person to have wondered this. Would there be any mileage in allowing 802.11b/g (WiFi, except to pedants) as a transceiver frequency band? It implies a degree of intelligence on the part of both ends of the link, but if theres a fair bit of electronics handling a complex robot anyway then a TCP/IP stack isnt so hard to add.
Obviously Im assuming that the device is going to do some decent error recovery, use some secure protocol to avoid accidental interference, have the obvious failsafes, and so on. Nonetheless, stuffing a cheap pcmcia card in a machine seems less hassle, once you have a level of intelligence on board, than playing with 40MHz radio modems. Note that I have no delusions about burying a laptop on board and expecting it to survive, although nano-ITX and a lot of padding might be interesting.
Even in combat conditions Id expect relatively decent bandwidth, and there wouldnt be the issues with crystal swapping. Bluetooth doesnt have the range, but 802.11 does. 802.11a has fewer interference issues, but the 2.4GHz variants are a bit more common.
Has anyone tried it? I can believe there are latency problems if theres a lot of interference (it might be helpful to try to get the audience to turn their laptops off!) but I dont see many other downsides.
Aside from protecting the hardware, the small motherboards are cheap, the cards are cheap, and you can drive it from a laptop - all of which would save me playing games with electronics which Im more likely to mis-use, and which is more expensive.
Anyway, just wondering if there was a reason not to allow it - or, if event organisers are happy with it, to explicitly allow them in the rules. If so it might be wise to request a bandwidth limit (otherwise the electrical jamming rule could be infringed by someone sending video back from a camera on the robot) but, safety checks aside, I dont think it would influence much else.
I dont need it for any robot Ill be building just yet, but it would be nice to know its out there in the future.
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Fluppet
I cant be the first person to have wondered this. Would there be any mileage in allowing 802.11b/g (WiFi, except to pedants) as a transceiver frequency band? It implies a degree of intelligence on the part of both ends of the link, but if theres a fair bit of electronics handling a complex robot anyway then a TCP/IP stack isnt so hard to add.
Obviously Im assuming that the device is going to do some decent error recovery, use some secure protocol to avoid accidental interference, have the obvious failsafes, and so on. Nonetheless, stuffing a cheap pcmcia card in a machine seems less hassle, once you have a level of intelligence on board, than playing with 40MHz radio modems. Note that I have no delusions about burying a laptop on board and expecting it to survive, although nano-ITX and a lot of padding might be interesting.
Even in combat conditions Id expect relatively decent bandwidth, and there wouldnt be the issues with crystal swapping. Bluetooth doesnt have the range, but 802.11 does. 802.11a has fewer interference issues, but the 2.4GHz variants are a bit more common.
Has anyone tried it? I can believe there are latency problems if theres a lot of interference (it might be helpful to try to get the audience to turn their laptops off!) but I dont see many other downsides.
Aside from protecting the hardware, the small motherboards are cheap, the cards are cheap, and you can drive it from a laptop - all of which would save me playing games with electronics which Im more likely to mis-use, and which is more expensive.
Anyway, just wondering if there was a reason not to allow it - or, if event organisers are happy with it, to explicitly allow them in the rules. If so it might be wise to request a bandwidth limit (otherwise the electrical jamming rule could be infringed by someone sending video back from a camera on the robot) but, safety checks aside, I dont think it would influence much else.
I dont need it for any robot Ill be building just yet, but it would be nice to know its out there in the future.
--
Fluppet
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