[robat-mentor]

Well after much trouble I think I have found some things that might help. We have found a series of quirks and tricks that are required for deployment to work. In order to help other teams get past these major problems, here's a list of the things you need to know. We learned these the hard way but we're glad to help any other team and save them from the hell we went through.

First of all, it's crucial that you do not have multiple channels active. What I mean by that is that when you plug in the USB cable you MUST disable the wired and wireless LAN adapters in your laptop. This is the ONLY way that Eclipse will not become hopelessly confused and remove the deploy menu option.

Secondly, after you have deployed you MUST unplug the USB and then plug it back in again BEFORE you can deploy again, otherwise Eclipse throws an unrelated error which is very misleading.

Thirdly, after you deploy code you MUST find the "restart robot code" button on the drivers station and press it. Otherwise the drivers station erroneously reports that there is NO ROBOT CODE on the roborio.

Fourthly, don't expect the roborio to flash the RSL like the Crio did. There seems to be only 2 modes. ON SOLID or BLINKING. Neither of these modes seems to have anything to do with robot code or the readiness of the roborio at all.

Finally, As I mentioned, whenever you deploy you MUST disable both wired and wireless LAN adapters so that the USB connection is the ONLY choice that Eclipse has available. Once you have deployed you must unplug the USB connector and enable your wireless adapter so that the drivers station can connect to the roborio. I find this very annoying and time consuming.

We have NEVER been able to deploy using ethernet, wired or wireless at all so we stopped wasting our time trying to make it work. There are always challenges related to the setup and usage of the FRC IDE but this season seems to have magnified those challenges and made them a complete show stopper. Our team has lost 1 week of our build season due to these newly introduced problems. We've been unable to deploy any code and therefore unable to test anything. Is this supposed to be part of the challenge?