[PaulRevere]

Today we had an interesting issue crop up with our cRIO. While attempting to get our camera working, I realized that out Driver Station and Development machines were out of date. So I updated our DS with the 1.1 update. Then I upgraded our development machine with the LabVIEW for FRC 2.1 Update. Once that was completed, I updated WPILibJ in NetBeans. (We are using Java for FRC.) Next, using our development machine, I formatted and imaged our cRIO with v20. (It was on v19). I then went into NetBeans and did a Clean and Compile of our robot’s code. It compiled, but when I tried to deploy it, Ant threw an exception stating that the file update.xml claimed there was a mismatch between our cRIO’s OS Version, and the one it wanted. I was unsure of the cause of this, but after looking at the file in question with Notepad, there indeed was a line that claimed v19 was needed. So I said “what the heck, let’s try changing it to v20 and see if it works.” So I changed v19 to v20, saved, and attempted a deploy in NetBeans. Sure enough, it worked fine, camera code included!

On a side note, during the 3+ hours of troubleshooting this issue, I downgraded our cRIO from v20 to v19 without editing the XML file. It would compile, and begin to deploy, but would get the stage just before the cRIO was to be rebooted. Just before it reached there, the cRIO’s FTP server crashed out for no apparent reason. I used a program called WireShark to capture the raw network packets going over our robot’s network, and everything appeared fine until that step, where the FTP server just stopped responding to my machine. (My machine was literally spamming the cRIO with FTP packets, and the cRIO just sat there, not even replying.) Oddly enough, I could still mount the FTP share MS-DOS (Even after it said the server had crashed. As soon as I pinged the cRIO, or did an FTP mount is DOS, the traffic in WireShark would resume, but NetBeans was still throwing, “Waiting for OTA Server…”)

If someone could let the WPILibJ team know of this issue, it’d be good. Hopefully if anyone else has this issue, this post will offer some insight. If anyone would find the packet capture dumps useful, I can post a ZIP Archive of them.