Competition Router Problems

[Team3597]

After just competing at the Granite State competition in New Hampshire, we kept coming up with a problem involving our router. After every round, or time we connected to the robot on the playing field, we wouldn't be able to connect to the router via Ethernet in the pit. If we wanted to preform any diagnostics on the robot, we had to re-flash it using the provided competition computers. As you can probably imagine, this was a big time waster. With having to worry about mechanical obstacles, the last thing we wanted to do was run our router back and forth. As of right now, we have no way to test a new router, as we don't have a regulation testing field, or a way to connect to the robot in the same fashion. If anyone had this same problem or found a solution to it, we would greatly appreciate some input before our next competition. Thank you.

[Kevin Sevcik]

Not sure if it's related, but you might look through this thread and see if anything looks helpful.

[rich2202]

Sounds like the problem mentioned in the thread from Kevin.

Give your Driver Station a fixed IP address of 10.xx.yy.5, where xx and yy are your team number. So for your team, that would be 10.35.97.5

[ozrien]

I've seen that a lot too.

What is supposed to happen is, on the field, every Ethernet node gets leased a 10.XX.YY.ZZ IP. Off the field, since there is no DHCP server, every EthNode should fall back to link-local 169.XX.YY.ZZ. This is the case for teams that use DHCP (most teams) and not static-ips (like that CD thread Kevin suggested).

My observation (particularly with Win8 but sometimes in Win7), the DS stays with 10.XX.YY.ZZ after the match. If the team is using DHCP, what I do when I have a team tether up (after a match) is....
-open a cmd shell.
-do "ipconfig"
-if the DS IP is 10.XX.YY.ZZ, do "ipconfig /release" then "ipconfig /renew"
-Then windows will animate the network icon in the bottom right (start menu). This is to show that windows is trying to re-DHCP.
-do another "ipconfig" to confirm it goes back to 169.XX.YY.ZZ

In Win8, after doing that, sometimes it still persists at 10.XX.Y.ZZ. So I disable/re-enable the network adapter. That seems to always work.

If IP is 169.XX.YY.ZZ [ok] and DS software is still No-Robot-Comm [not ok], I usually just restart the DS software.

Alternatively if the EthNodes are all static, I don't think you will see this issue. But if you're helping a team out after a match, you may not have the time to do this, so hopefully this quick procedure might help.