FMS/cRIO comm issue

[sdaustin]

We have an issue with our cRIO – FMS is unable to establish communications with it under any circumstances. The cRIO works fine in all other configurations. With the help of FIRST and National Instruments people (details below), we believe that there is something about the way that the FMS communicates with the cRIO that is exposing a hardware defect that is not otherwise exposed.

Therefore, I need to get in touch with someone that understands the intricate details of the low-level implementation of FMS.

The Details
We had to forfeit our first five qualification matches (and put our alliance partners at a significant disadvantage) at the Kettering District competition because our cRIO would not work under the FMS - it could not connect to the FMS & vice versa. It worked fine hard-wired or via wireless using the onboard DLink AP. We checked everything that the Lead Robot Inspector (Mike Martus), the National Instruments rep onsite (Andrew Watchorn), and the FIRST Technical Advisor (I don’t have his name), could think of, but no luck. Their consensus opinion was that FMS was exposing a cRIO defect. We exchanged ours for a loaner cRIO and everything worked fine.

After the event, I opened a support case with National Instruments, and it got assigned to a support rep (Joe) who was himself a FIRST mentor for the past eight years. After several phone calls and running through every possible thing he could think of to reproduce the problem in our shop, we went to the Waterford district competition the next weekend, hoping that the problem was resolved. Luckily, we were able to get our robot on the field before the opening ceremony to test it. The exact same problem still occurred. We replace the cRIO with a loaner and the problem went away, again.

But we still didn’t have a reproducible failure scenario. In spite of this, NI authorized an RMA for us to send the unit in for repair. And now, of course, they are unable to reproduce the problem. Their diagnostics can’t find anything wrong with our cRIO and so they want to send it back unless I can give them some situation under which they can reproduce the problem.

Unfortunately, the only way to do so is on an actual field at a competition, which is not a viable option because we’ve already gone to both of our district competitions and are done for the season.

So I either need a way to run the FMS in our shop or to get in touch with someone that can give me more details of how it is implemented in the hopes that we can create a reproducible scenario.

Any suggestions?


Thanks,
Scott Austin
Coach, Team 3667, The PoHo RoBos