Basestation

The basestation is responsible for setting up and connection between the PC and the robots themselves. At the moment we have two types of basestation, old and new basestation. At the time of writing, 'new basestation' is almost finished, but not yet.

The basestation that is currently in use consists out of a standard Nucleo development board (nucleo f767zi), with a custom PCB slapped on-top of it that hosts two communication chips (SX1280), some LEDs and a display connection. We have a total of three of these stations.

One basestation can only connect to one team (yellow or blue) at the time. This means that if you want to play a game against yourself, you will need two separate basestations. The frequencies at which the basestation and robots communicate can be changed in Wireless/Wireless.h

The robots can not all communicate with the basestation simultaneously. It would be as if eleven players talked to the coach all at once. The basestation is only able to communicate with one robot at a time. This only works if each robot waits for its turn to speak. This protocol, in which each robot has a specific timeslot to communicate, is called Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA). Approximately every 1ms, the basestation sends a command to a robot. The robot has around 0.5ms to respond with its feedback. Given a maximum of 16 robots, an approximate 1ms interval gives around 60 packets per robot per second.