Ports changed independently?
 

Hey, I'm Yair from team 5951, head of programming team and we've encountered a weird problem. As we were testing out some of the motors from the 2016th game's robot, we noticed some motors didn't work, some worked twice (iterated through all ports). We went into the NI web based configuration & Monitoring via Mozilla Firefox and we noticed some talons had the same port. We thought "No problem, let's fix that", and we did. Problem was, a few seconds later we noticed the site got refreshed and the motors got new ports, that happened a couple of times. I don't believe it was something in the code since it was a really simple code that just iterated through the talons and activated each of them for a few seconds. Did any other team experience this weird problem? How did you fix it? Do you think it's a problem with the roborio?

Thanks in advance :cool:

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

As the symptoms don't make much sense for PWM control, I'm presuming that you're using Talon SRXs controlled through CAN.

What did you do with the
?

Best guess:

It sounds like the Talon SRXs were never given addresses, or given duplicate addresses. The directions to detect and correct this is given in section 2.2 (pages 16 and 17) of the Talon SRX Software Reference Manual. Note that it is necessary to refresh the browser after changing the address; failure to do this caused us some unnecessary confusion the first time we did it. We now do a refresh following each assignment; possibly overkill, but better than confusion.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

Yes, we use Talon SRXs using CAN connections. When we said "No problem, let's fix that" we changed the ports in the NI web based configuration & Monitoring (http://roborio-xxxx-frc.local/) and manually changed the ports.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

Check the can buss for issues, look for retry counts, (I think the are on the same status page, going from memory) make sure you have the can wired correctly, with terminating resistors at each end, and daisy chained through the devices.

When Setting device id's make sure you use the "Flash LED" command to identify the correct talon srx before setting the id and buss number. Quite common to setting the id to another SRX than the one you wanted.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

Assuming two Talons are on the same address: Needless to say you need to power off (pull the fuse) or disconnect from the canbus the Talon you do not want to change. The Wiki simple way is to only power the Talon you want to configure.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

Another thing that happens, is that it shows that a talon srx is a pdb and sometimes even a vrm, which gets me even more confused (Image added as example)

http://imgur.com/a/AgTjm

And it says in the picture that it's port is number 6, when a second before that happened the port was 1.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

Another thing that happens, is that it shows that a talon srx is a pdb and sometimes even a vrm, which gets me even more confused (Image added as example)

http://imgur.com/a/AgTjm

And it says in the picture that it's port is number 6, when a second before that happened the port was 1.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

Mismatched device icons is explained in section 21.19 in the Talon SRX Software reference manual. Rebooting the RIO, or RIO-resets, requires manual refresh of the browser (duplicate tab, close-reopen-window, press F5 or CTRL-R). If you change device IDs using a browser opened prior to RIO-reset or RIO power cycle, then you will see the symptoms you have reported.

Common ID talons reveal themselves as red blips on the Talon LEDs and web-config literally tells you when this happens in the software status. See section 2.2 in the Talon SRX Software reference manual for details.

Re: Ports changed independently?
 

If Omar's advice above is not enough to resolve your issue, refer to Frank's a bit farther up. That is, only put one "unadressed" device on the bus at a time. Make sure (through a refresh) that its address has been fixed before adding another new device. It will take a bit longer, but is less likely to lead to a confusing assignment of bus IDs.