Hello, and thanks in advance for monitoring the forum so diligently. We have a group of 7 students who will soon be split into teams working on 3 separate robots at the same time in the same classroom to learn the basics of programming. Ideally, each team would use their own MacBook to program their assigned GoPiGo robot using Scratch in an independent fashion. Is there a way for three robots to share the same WiFi connection (this is a public middle school)? Perhaps some way to point VNC to a unique MAC address or wlan identifier? We are 99% sure the WiFi setup at the school uses DHCP so the IP address will fluctuate but will confirm that tomorrow.
Thank you again for your assistance.
Regards,
Jim
P.S. As an aside, the students named their group “codebreakers”, thus my forum login name.
So there’s an easy way to do this, and an even easier way to do it. If you’re using a Mac, I’m assuming your students will be using VNC to login to their robots. Is that correct?
If so, you’ll just need to change two of the hostnames. The hostname is the name that the computer takes on, and also becomes it’s bonjour name. The standard honstame the pi comes with is raspberrypi, and when you try to connect on a network as you describe, you can connect to “raspberrypi.local”.
So what you want to do is rename two of the three hostnames to something else, other than raspberrypi. Just to illustrate, I’ll assume you want to call it “raspberry2”
You can changet the hostname in two easy steps on the command line:
sudo nano /etc/hosts
and replace “raspberrypi” with “raspberry2”. Be sure to keep that tab space in there ahead of the raspberrypi/raspberry2.
Ctrl-x out and save the file
Next, sudo nano /etc/hostname
Here just replace “raspberrypi” with “raspberry2” and save the file again.
You can reboot and the new login will be to “raspberry2.local”.
Your students can name their Pi anything they want to at this point.