Radio takes really long to connect.

[Mr. Rogers]

I'm mechanical, but our programmers keep saying that the 3 minute wait time to connect our robot to the drivers station through the D-link is either "normal" or they don't know what's wrong. I remember it taking half that time on our off-season bots. Sometimes we have to reboot robot, restart the driver station program, or restart the laptop to get it to connect. Is there something in the wireless settings that could be wrong? The radio is off of a 2011 bot, no need to update any software on the D-link right?

[RufflesRidge]

If the radio is set to auto mode, it can take ~30sec longer to get things going. The fix is to set to either AP or bridge as appropriate for how you are connecting it.

[cgmv123]

Even in AP mode, it takes a while to boot up. I don't think it's quite 3 minutes, but it's very noticeable.

[Alan Anderson]

I've timed the D-Link DAP-1522 at a consistent 52 seconds from power on until it can be connected to. That's pretty bad for something that's going to be turned off and back on regularly.

[zaphodp.jensen]

That is a standard boot up time for a router. Usually routers take a long time to configure their internal radio at startup, get stored variables inserted in RAM, and other startup things that can take a while. We have our router in AP mode, so that we can connect directly to the robot.

As this boots up, the cRIO is booting in sync, and usually takes longer to initialize everything, and then even longer to detect Robot Code.

One solution: If you need to restart your robot, press either the Reboot cRIO button on the Driver Station, or push the hardware reset button (located near the ethernet ports) on the Robot end. That way you never have to fully power down your robot. The hardware reset works all the time, even if estopped, while the software reset works some of the time, glitches and estop excepted.

[RufflesRidge]

Originally Posted by zaphodp.jensen

As this boots up, the cRIO is booting in sync, and usually takes longer to initialize everything, and then even longer to detect Robot Code.

If your cRIO takes longer to boot than your radio, I would very carefully examine your code. cRIO boot times should be in the 20-45s range.

[zaphodp.jensen]

Originally Posted by RufflesRidge

If your cRIO takes longer to boot than your radio, I would very carefully examine your code. cRIO boot times should be in the 20-45s range.

I believe that was last year (or two years ago, with the bridge) when we had these problems. But that's a sidenote. I haven't actually done a timed test this year, from cold start to full com, and usually by the time I actually connect to the radio, the cRIO has plenty of time to boot.

[nitneylion452]

Originally Posted by Mr. Rogers

I'm mechanical, but our programmers keep saying that the 3 minute wait time to connect our robot to the drivers station through the D-link is either "normal" or they don't know what's wrong. I remember it taking half that time on our off-season bots. Sometimes we have to reboot robot, restart the driver station program, or restart the laptop to get it to connect. Is there something in the wireless settings that could be wrong? The radio is off of a 2011 bot, no need to update any software on the D-link right?

One possibility is that your laptop itself is taking a while to find and connect to your robot. We have this issue every now and again. There's really nothing you can do to change it, so for the most part, it's "normal."