FIRST Robotics FRC VPN for On-Device Testing

FIRST Robotics Competition robots run on NI RoboRIO controllers with FPGA hardware. When team members couldn’t physically access the robot, I built a VPN system that allowed remote programming and testing of the actual device — not a simulator, the real hardware. The challenge was latency: robot control code that works fine over a local connection can behave very differently over a VPN with 50 milliseconds of added round-trip time. Solving that taught the team (and me) as much about networking as it did about robotics.