"cRIO Unavailable" in FRC driver station

[xio]

Hello everyone,

We are setting up a "new" driver station so that we can operate two robots at separate events at the same time. The original drive station communicating fine. However, with the "new" driver station we are getting the error "cRIO Unavailable" and the software does not update the robot IP address on the dashboard.

We have run through everything that we can think of:
* Both stations have the same IP address and mask
* The "new" station sees the cRIO fine using the reimage tool
* Both stations can ping the cRIO with the IP address that the reimage tool reports
* Team number is set correctly (and the same)
* Both stations have the "Choose NIC" settings the same - "I will configure my XYZ network manually"
* Firewall on the "new" station is turned off. Firewall is turned on with the working station
* The lights on the "diagnostic" tab are the same between the two stations (except for the "communications" and "Robot code" lights on the far left).
* The messages in the "diagnostics" tab look the same between the two stations.
* Both are connected by cable (tethered)
* Both are running the latest drive station software "DS 02.12.13.00"

One significant difference is that the working station is running Windows 7 and the "new" station is XP (thus the quotes). However, XP "should" work, right? The "new" station is a much older laptop, but, again, that shouldn't make a difference.

So, we're stumped. Does anyone have any suggestion of what might be going on?

Many thanks,

--mark

[Greg McKaskle]

Are you connecting both driver stations at the same time? If that is the case, it will cause several problems. You can't have two computers on the same subnet with the same IP, and even if given different IPs, you still have a situation where one robot has two DSes. It will hopefully pick one to listen to and respond, but odd things can certainly happen. Pick one of the DSes and give it a .15 or some other IP. Please be sure to make the competition laptop be .5 or the FMS will not find it.

Greg McKaskle

[FrankJ]

XP is fine the driver station. You can look on task manager to be sure nothing is consuming all the CPU. We had that one year with smart dashboard & vision processing. (but that is a different story.)


Since you are tethered that eliminates wireless issues. You shouldn't have both DS computers with the same IP plugged in at the same time (what Greg said). Unless you are trying to use FMS the DS does not have to be IP 10.xx.xx.5 but you should not have two DS trying to talk to the same robot. Your DS should have the same team number as the CRIO ie 10.xx.xx.yz where XX.XX is the team number.

We have found that sometimes once one driver station has been connected to the CRIO, we have to reboot the CRIO to get another driver station to connect.

[xio]

No, the stations aren't connected at the same time. We tried restarting the robot as well without success. Basically, we move the cable from one DS laptop to the other and always one works and one doesn't.

We didn't check the CPU level. However, as this is a pretty old laptop I did wonder if maybe there might be a race condition in the DS software - that is, maybe the software is reaching out to the cRIO but the response isn't actually reaching the DS software until it times out. Not really sure how to test for that though.

Thoughts?

Anyway...thanks for the quick replies.

--mark

[FrankJ]

DS runs on the old classmates. A pretty slow computer.

Check the that the IP is correct in the DS. Open the window network adapter tool, check the status and be sure the IP is what you think it is.

[Alan Anderson]

It's possible that the network adapter on your XP system has gotten configured with multiple IP addresses. That can confuse the Driver Station. Go into the advanced TCP/IP settings and remove any additional configurations you find, leaving only the 10.te.am.5 one.

[Joe Ross]

What antivirus is on the computer that doesn't work?