Intermittent Disconnect from Robot

[Tim Hamilton]

Hi,
I am a programmer from Team 2367, Lancer Robotics. During testing, we found that our robot would often disconnect intermittently during testing and then regain connection again. We looked at the D.S logs and saw large amounts of packet loss during the disconnection periods. We switched out routers and moved the routers away any other electronics, but the issue keeps reoccuring. Unless its the roboRio itself, I don't know what may be the issue.

-Timothy Hamilton
Programmer and Captain of Team 2367, Lancer Robotics

[Mark McLeod]

That's odd.
If you are truly disconnected from the robot, then there should be a big empty space in the log with minimal data, since it comes from the robot and the robot can't send it to the DS while disconnected.

If you have logged data then the robot and DS are connected.
Then it might be possible that your robot code is having issues.

When it happens I suggest watching the Diagnostic tab to see if any of the pings are failing to the radio or roboRIO.

[jwhite]

We've had this as well. The culprit really does seem to be the Autodesk Update Manager, or perhaps any application that uses CPU or network heavily.

The driver station seems to be generally vulnerable to any cpu usage on the driver station; just launching eclipse will net us a packet drop. That's usually not enough to get a full disconnect, though.

We had tried disabling the update manager; telling it to not run, but it doesn't seem to respect that configuration setting, as we had the problem come back, just as you've described. And we found autodesk processes running.

Removing every single Autodesk product from the driver station has so far cured the problem, but we're watching it.

Cheers,

Jeremy

[nedwards28]

We are having similar issues as well. We noticed that it seems to connect just fine but then we drive around and it gets spotty exactly how the original poster said. We think it may get worse when the compressor turns on? We are still working on that.

[jwhite]

While we no longer have the 'packet drops every 8 seconds' problem, we have seen some unusual behavior.

That is, on rare occasion, we'll get in a mode with heavy, heavy packet loss. You'll see the comm light flicker red/green, and the log will show lots of packet loss.

Our current theory is that it has to do with the smart dashboard getting out of sync with the roborio. The method we've used that has worked (so far; we've only had it 2-3 times) is to power down the roborio, close *every* program on the driver station (particularly the smart dashboard and driver station), and then start clean.

We may be behind a rev on our software as well; we're going to check that shortly. There have been fairly recent (i.e. within the past week) updates that I think we missed. I can't find a detailed changelog to sense whether or not this was covered in it, though.

Cheers,

Jeremy