I'm still not positive about the cRIO gateway setting, or if it is related to the problem, however, some of the guys on my team are theorizing that it could be a startup issue.
Here's a timeline, a few educated guesses, and maybe a fix: (when operating in a wireless mode)
- apply power to the bot
- cRIO comes up first, wireless bridge still booting
- cRIO network comes up, doesn't see an "active" bridge, and times out
- wireless bridge comes up, but too late for cRIO
- no ethernet connection
- reset the cRIO (using a paper clip on the reset button)
- wireless ethernet connects almost immediately
I didn't get much time with the 'bot yesterday, so it was hard to troubleshoot, but when we followed the timeline above, we had no disconnection issues at all.
I'd like to see if the cRIO will re-attempt after 30 or 60 seconds ... stay tuned.
If this theory is correct, and we want to avoid delays at competitions, then we might expect a cRIO firmware patch to slow down its bootup process and wait a little while for the bridge to come up.
Like I said above, this is all just a theory. I hope that it either gets patched, or I'm wrong, because I don't want to have to paper-clip-reset the cRIO every time we turn it on ...
edit: I just posted a question to the NI forums. Perhaps their engineers could shed some light on this for us.
edit2: here's a link to the NI forum question (no activity yet)
http://decibel.ni.com/content/thread/5712?tstart=0