CRio Connection: Buggy

[ChaosX73]

We got the most recent LabView update today, and after reimaging the CRio (which was successful by the way), I opened the driver's station. My computer is tethered to the bot and we have not had communications problems before now. Now, even though I can ping the robot successfully, the communications only like to come on for one second, turn off, wait a minute, and then repeat. On the CRio, the Status LED blinks 4 times in a row and repeats that. I have power-cycled the bot many times and, yes, I have restarted my computer. Nothing is working.

What happened? Does the Labview update contain evil?

[Joe Ross]

After imaging the cRIO, there is no code installed on the robot. Does that explain your problem?

[ChaosX73]

It's not the fact that there is no code, it's the fact that for some reason, the CRio doesn't want to admit that it's connected to my computer. My mentor said something about the CRio being "Bricked" but I have no idea what that means.

[mswalker]

We are having the same issue. After re-imaging the cRio (three times successfully) and updating labview, we cannot run code on the cRio. We can ping it but when we try to "run at startup" we get a message that Labview cannot communicate with the real time target. The status light on the cRio repeats a series of 4 flashes as reported above.

[Greg McKaskle]

Four flashes means a double crash. The manual mentions it could be due to running out of memory.

You may want to watch the deployment dialog closely to see if that indicates a memory issue.

Greg McKaskle

[Mark McLeod]

Just got the same thing at one of the teams here.

Re-imaged the cRIO with v27 and we start getting the 4 blinks repeated.
Cannot download code but can reimage it to our hearts content.

I can reimage with v25 and everything works fine again.

[Joe Ross]

Originally Posted by Mark McLeod

Re-imaged the cRIO with v27 and we start getting the 4 blinks repeated.
Cannot download code but can reimage it to our hearts content.

Does the serial console show anything interesting?

[Mark McLeod]

I have console dumps, but haven't been able to look at them.
I did get it working, but I'll have to wait on posting an update.
I'm in transit between teams.

[mswalker]

We managed to get code to deploy/run a few times but mostly we get the four flashes in Status. On one of the times it worked, I checked the memory usage and there was still 16K or so free.

The four flashes in status start even after a reboot with no attempt to deploy. I tried disconnecting everything - removing all sidecar adapters, ethernet connections etc. And rebooted. And still the cRIO showed four flashes.

From a laptop I can ping the cRio before trying to run. When I try to run I get "can't connect to real time target" but after cancelling, I can still ping the cRio.

I have not tried to go back to v25. I'll check that out.

[Greg McKaskle]

16K is not much. Can you verify that number and clarify when you are at 16K?

Greg McKaskle

[Chris Hibner]

I just want to jump in to say that we've seen similar issues since the update.

Since the update we haven't been able to deploy code wirelessly. When we try to deploy wired, we haven't been successful when hooked to the Dlink. If we connect directly to the cRIO, we are successful deploying about 25% of the time (i.e. it takes about 4 tries before it works).

After deploying new software and rebooting, we are able to get the robot to run wirelessly through the driver station. No issues.

We have not yet been able to run software via the Run button since the update. It starts to run and then it promply loses connection.

That's all I have for now. I won't see the cRIO until Wednesday night, so if I notice anything new then I'll try and post it.

[IisMathwizard]

I currently have a temporary solution. Our team had the same problem and what we found is that we plug an ethernet cord into the linksys slot 1 in the rear and plug the other end into a laptop and wait a bit it finally works. we have no clue why but it works. also, one of our mentors (going for his masters in computer science) played around with it a bit and all of a sudden it works well now. We don't even have to plug it into an ethernet cord and laptop. yay

[IisMathwizard]

I can later reply back with a post on what he did when i meet him next.

[mswalker]

We made some progress in identifying this problem.

First, reimaging back to the v25 cRio firmware corrected the problem. There were no blinking status lights and we could deploy code at will.

I then re-imaged using v27 making sure to connect directly from PC to cRio via ethernet. The four blink status light returned. We could not deploy code getting the "failed to connect to Real-time Target" message. We checked to make sure Labview was at 3.1 FRC level.

We had loaded the CAN driver for the Black Jaguar Serial Bridge and had that working under v25. In the cRio Imaging tool I first changed the plugin to "None" leaving "Enable NetConsole" checked. Reimaged at v27 and still had four blink status.

Then I unchecked "Enable NetConsole" and reimaged. That seemed to fix it. cRio booted and I was able to deploy code.

It appears that adding the NetConsole and maybe CAN is consuming memory and putting us over. We have a 2009 cRio. Does this make sense? Are we going to have to avoid CAN? An ideas?

[jhersh]

Please post console logs (both NetConsole and Serial Console) when you see this issue.

Thanks,
-Joe