No, I did not say those things “would affect” a VEXnet connection. I said it’s possible. I didn’t say “definitely”, or “most likely”. I said “possible” for a reason. The post I was replying to was asking for things they could do to help avoid issues. I gave a possible explanation, and an easy thing for a team to do to avoid that possibility. It may not be a very likely possibility, but it’s an easy thing to avoid, even if there’s only a 1% chance of it being an issue (note, I don’t know what the chances are at all, but my semi-educated guess is that it’s not 0%).
Your anecdote about your drone is a great example of selection bias. Your statement implies that because you personally haven’t had issues with your drone’s wireless link that therefore that proves that the drone’s wireless link is superior to VEXnet. That could be true, but your lone experience does not prove that. The problem with that logic is there are certainly teams who have not had issues with VEXnet either. Likewise, a quick Google search shows that there are definitely people complaining about Mavic Pro dropouts. Doing a meaningful comparison of the two would be an excellent task for a statistics class.
It’s also probable that the drone is working with much different constraints than VEXnet. The VEXnet wireless hardware has to fit in a small USB key. Because of the size, and probably for other reasons, the wireless output power isn’t going to be very high. Certainly less than your drone, as your drone needs to be controllable from much greater distances than a VEX robot does. VEXnet doesn’t have external antennas like most drone controllers do, etc. Also, you reference running 4 drones at once and comparing that to a VEX event, but you’re forgetting that a VEX event has dozens of robots operating at the same time (in the pits, etc). At Worlds there could easily be 40-50 robots active on a competition channel at the same time, and dozens or hundreds active on other channels in their pits or on practice fields.
There were well over 1,500 VRC matches played at Worlds last year, or 180,000 seconds of match time. Finding a few instances where there’s 5-10 seconds of apparent issue out of 180,000 seconds frankly doesn’t surprise me at all. Is it unfortunate, especially for impacted teams? Absolutely. But, there’s people on the forum who are starting to act like it happens every match, and are also implying that VEX doesn’t care or isn’t doing anything to prevent it. I firmly believe those things to be false; I know very well how hard VEX works to ensure that things work. The reality is it will never be perfect. Sorry, that’s just life. And, that’s where we get back to one of the big problems here: winning isn’t supposed to be everything in VEX. Every student involved in VEX is having this amazing experience, and learning life lessons that will last a long time. VEX works hard to make their equipment work the best that it can, and they are constantly working always to make it better, but at a certain point the answer really becomes “we’ve done all we could, and it’s not supposed to be only about winning anyway”.
TL;DR: Wireless is tricky and hard to both visualize and diagnose. ANY wireless transmitter could possibly interfere with any other wireless receiver. An easy way to probably reduce the risk of interference in your match is to keep unnecessary transmitters away from the field.
P.S. Obviously something went wrong in that match that I responded to. I personally do not think what happened there was caused by any team’s robot equipment (i.e. IMO it wasn’t any team’s fault, unless they were actively using a WiFi device against event rules). However, if that happened at my event, I would NOT replay the match, because it didn’t appear to affect the outcome. Perhaps that was the judgement made by the field staff at the time as well.
