Driver won't communicate with robot

[Potatonator]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

This would initially appear to be one of three cases:

Network congestion. Are your robot and driverstation the ONLY two computers on the network?

Yes

Wifi congestion. Are there other networks in close proximity that utilize the same channel that might be interfering?

We aren't sure how to check on that

Gaming adapter placement. Is your adapter away from the drive motors, battery cable, and also not surrounded by metal?

Yes

Also, you should check the CPU usage of the cRIO. You can check it from the driver station. If it is at 100%, your code is likely the culprit.

CPU usage is just fine

Do the symptoms disappear when you tether? Do they happen when your robot is stationary, or only when it is trying to move (under electrical load)?

Problems go away when we tether, but they do happen even if it's not moving.

@Alan: We checked, we aren't running it twice.

We're thinking it might be a bad router, but not sure yet.

[icecube45]

Potatonator,

We had the same problem, and unfortunately lost about 3 days of build time trying to solve it.

I believe it is simply wifi congestion for you,
at our workspace (school), we get the same error, but at nasa yesterday for driver practice (thanks 254), we had no problem, as there were only two wifi networks there, compared to the ~10 here.

If you can, try to go somewhere with less wifi, and check if you still have the problem.

We're kind of stuck with driver practice until we can find a spot at the school to practice (put your robot on the cart, and go travel around to different areas, looking for a less congested space)


Hope you resolve this,
icecube45

[Potatonator]

I just checked the wifi channels at our school. As far as I can tell, our router is channel 1, and all the school's networks are 11. So I doubt interference is the issue.

[Chris_Ely]

I have seen this happen at demos when there are many WiFi networks , and devices around. Other devices like smart phones will try to connect automatically to the network. We solved this problem by making the robot network an encrypted hidden network by selecting enable hidden wireless in the radio's wireless settings.

[Potatonator]

How would we access the radio's settings? We can't seem to find it.

[Chris_Ely]

Originally Posted by Potatonator

How would we access the radio's settings? We can't seem to find it.

Go to the radio's IP address in a browser. Then go to setup, and check "Enable Hidden Wireless," and hit save. You will then have to manually tell your computer to connect to the network as described here.

[samfruth]

The only other solution I can think of is that in Driver Station under the Setup tab in the 'Choose NIC' option make sure that your setting is set so that you DON'T configure it automatically, but instead through wifi. However, I believe that you said you were able to connect, so this may not be a viable solution.

[Potatonator]

Well, the fix luckof13 gave us worked. Thank you all for your assistance =D.