Over the past few summers I’ve been learning how to fly RC airplanes and have been fairly successful at them being able to land an RC plane on the water and fly from our pontoon boat while cruising around the lake. The end goal for the RC planes is to be doing UAV’s. The platform is nearly complete as I have all the components and just need to take that leap of faith and program the arduino with a mission plan. While I work up the confidence in my build I decided to get an RC truck (I’ve owned 4 different ones, still have an electric and nitro Traxxas Stampede) that could be used as an urban rover. I picked up a Traxxas Summit because of some of the features it has such as: remote 2 speed transmission, remote locking front and rear differentials, 4 wheel drive, and size. This truck is huge, it’s a 1/10 scale RC truck. It has a 16″ or so wheel span with an overall length of almost 2′. The larger the vehicle the more stable the video feed is going to be. I coupled this truck with a 2.4GHz Futaba 7C RC transmitter.

But now for the fun stuff. Driving the RC truck using LOS (line of sight) is one thing, but how about driving it around the block from my deck? 900MHz video down-link to the rescue. I’m using a 500mW transmitter on the truck with a small camera mounted to a pan/tilt assembly so I can freely move the camera 180 degrees left right and close to 180 degrees up and down. This video stream is received by my ground station box that houses a 7″ LCD monitor and HP mini (this is more for the UAV to do mission control from). The ground station also has connections for video goggles for complete immersion into the FPV concept. While using the goggles I can’t see anything else other than what the camera sees. Mounted in the goggles is a head tracker which when enabled will control the pan/tilt servos moving the camera where I look.

Whenever I start roaming around the neighborhood with this people come out of their garages and try to figure out where the person controlling the truck is. I’ve managed to go around both halves (block divided by alley) of our block with a little bit of video distortion. I’m looking for some old Tonka truck bodies so I can modify one to hold the camera and everything inside the truck instead of on top of it like I have it. I’m also looking to add bi-directional audio and maybe an ipod shuffle for music.

First up the good:
Cisco (Yes Cisco was not at WFD2, but I’m still including them) & Meraki are by far the easiest APs to install to a drop down ceiling or other. Their mounts are metal and feel sturdy to me. I didn’t feel like I would break them if I had to pull the AP down multiple times during install. Total install time: 2 minutes.

Now the bad:
Aerohive, while their bracket was fairly easy to remove the AP from it’s all plastic. I also had issues trying to get it to go onto my T rail. They won points for making the AP at least easily removable from the mount. I like it when I can leave the mount up, but take the AP down. This works better for RMAs. But what is with this plastic? Am I the only one that wants a metal mounting plate? Total install time: 4 minutes.

Finally the ugly:
Aruba, I felt like I was going to either break the mount or skin my knuckles trying to get that thing on the AP. I do believe a few choice words were used while trying to snap that into position. I also can’t see how this would work if you had to take it on and off. Now for mounting it to the T rail, that took way too long to do! I couldn’t get it to latch on properly where I felt that it wouldn’t fall off and hit me on the head. Total install time: 9 minutes.

You’ll notice that someone is left out of this: Ruckus. While I was provided with a Ruckus AP I was not provided with a ceiling mount kit so I cannot test that.

I also factored in another detail when doing the testing: survey setups. When I need to do a site survey I want to have the AP mounted properly up against the ceiling. This is not always easy to do, but Cisco and Meraki would still win that battle.

Below you can see pictures of all of the mounts as well as my tripod mount that I would attach the bracket to for surveying purposes.

Should be an amazing week with all the other delegates that have been selected already, just look at the talent that is going to be attending:

	Marcus Burton	CWNP	@MarcusBurton
	Sam Clements	SC-WiFi	@Samuel_Clements
	Daniel Cybulskie	SimplyWiFi	@SimplyWifi
	Rocky Gregory	Intensified	@BionicRocky
	Tom Hollingsworth	The Networking Nerd	@NetworkingNerd
	Jennifer Huber	Wireless CCIE, here I come!	@JenniferLucille
	Blake Krone	Digital Lifestyle	@BlakeKrone
	Chris Lyttle	WiFi Kiwi’s Blog	@WiFiKiwi
	Andrew vonNagy	Revolution Wi-Fi	@RevolutionWiFi

I’ve met a lot of the delegates at various Cisco events: Sam and Jennifer I see at all the Cisco Mobility PVT’s, Tom and Andrew I hung out with at Cisco Live 2011 (way too much fun!). I’m looking forward to finally meeting Chris and Rocky in person after talking to them online for a little over a year now!

All and all this should be a great week and I can’t wait for the learning to start! Stay tuned for post event blogs as well, I’m sure I’ll have some good ones!

If you have been following me on Twitter (@blakekrone) or read my other blog post CCIE-Wireless Lab: What Did I Learn you know I’ve been working hard at obtaining those digits for awhile now. It’s quite a relief knowing that I’m done and that it is in fact doable. This time around I wasn’t nervous about the lab at all, I knew I had fixed a lot of my mistakes in practice and speed was on my side. I thought I would share some of my tactics on how I finally conquered the exam.

• ORGANIZE - In order to pass this test you need to be organized, you can’t just step through the exam. The very first thing I do when I sit down is I read the ENTIRE workbook page by page. As I’m reading I’m writing down in outline format the key points to each section and how many points the section is worth. This allows me to have a “checklist” for when 3/4pm comes around and it is time to verify.
• SPEED – The name of the game in version 1 is speed. Given the multitude of WLCs that you are presented with you really need to know how to configure them from the CLI. Notepad is your friend during the lab, every command that I ran on any of my hardware was saved in Notepad documents, this allowed me to verify what I had done (looking for typos), remember what I had done, and also allowed me to copy paste between devices. My favorite code snippet that I used was “save config CR (carriage return) y CR” which allowed me to save the config on my WLCs in a matter of seconds (useful for before lunch, end of day, etc). You also need to know Autonomous CLI backwards and forwards.
• EXECUTE – The very first thing I do in the execute phase is group together common tasks and a proper task flow of my outline. Just because the workbook has something as the last step doesn’t mean you can’t do that first if it makes sense. As I go through my own outline I’m looking at the workbook at the same time, applying all the configurations from my Notepad documents or using the GUI if I have to. By using scripts I can create 6 dynamic interfaces for example across multiple WLCs in less than 5 minutes. As I step through my outline I’m putting a line through each item that I know is correct, and circling anything that I might have to go back to.
• VERIFY – I can’t stress this one enough! This was my biggest failure in all my previous attempts, I simply didn’t know the right show commands to verify my configuration was actually 100% correct and followed what was asked of me. Your verify stage should be started by 3pm, 4pm at the latest to fully get through the entire workbook a second time. Remember, the devil lies in the details on this exam. Just because it doesn’t make sense doesn’t make it wrong, this is a lab not real life!

The CCIE Lab not only tests your technical skills, but it also tests how methodically you can think, something we need to do when we are installing or when we architect a design in real life. I’ve heard multiple times that this lab was designed to be done in 4 hours, I started configuring my hardware at 10am after doing all my planning. We had a 30 minute lunch break around 1115-1145. I was completely done with my configurations by 3pm, which left me 2 hours to verify which was important as I found a couple of typos that I had made. Once 4pm roles around consider your configuration FROZE, DO NOT CHANGE UNLESS ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY! I can’t stress that enough, on one attempt I made the stupid mistake of trying something different on my client PC at 4pm, this resulted in my completely hosing my VM image and I had to ask for them to restore the image. I got the image back at 445pm and had to rush through those steps again.

Finally, don’t give up. I’m not afraid to show this image, it took me 5 tries, but it only took me 1 to pass.