Driver Station Freezing

[Jared]

It happened twice today in all of our matches. We never had the failure where we could enable our robot while connected. I've noticed that many other teams are having weird issues with long connection times on the field at NE district champs, and we usually have to restart the driver station and change our team number to another number and back before we can connect to the field.

Restarting the driver station does not stop the driver station from freezing, but if I log out/log in, the driver station will work normally.

We also see an error message when tethering which says "The mDNS service is slow to respond". The same error came up on the old laptop all the time, but we never experienced the freeze.

The laptop that had this issue has no extra software on it at all. It's an hp 350 g1 laptop that is brand new, and I uninstalled skype, evernote, and a DVD player application. I also removed all antivirus software and disabled the firewall. I'll be able to give the msinfo32 data in a few days.

The freeze has only happened after we connect to the robot through the field and when I click on the third tab down on the left (the gear, IIRC).

[MrRoboSteve]

Originally Posted by Jared

I've noticed that many other teams are having weird issues with long connection times on the field at NE district champs, and we usually have to restart the driver station and change our team number to another number and back before we can connect to the field.

What you describe here is pretty normal for 2015. For teams with otherwise working DS/Robot combos, it was a pain but not a blocker.

[Alan Anderson]

Just for completeness -- what version of the Driver Station are you using?

[Jared]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

Just for completeness -- what version of the Driver Station are you using?

I don't have the laptop with me to check, but I downloaded the update from the NI website on 4/6/2015.

[BenGuy]

I'm not sure about the FMS issue, but our DS freezes occasionally too. We worked out that the dashboard was malfunctioning and taking up all of our RAM and CPU resources. After killing the process in Task Mananger, the DS started working again. You might want to check if that's what is going on with yours.

[Joe Ross]

The Offseason Driver Station Update resolves at least one freezing issue, as well as several other issues.

[billbo911]

Excellent!
Thanks for the Heads Up Joe!

[Jared]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

The Offseason Driver Station Update resolves at least one freezing issue, as well as several other issues.

And we can now view our pdp logs!!

[billbo911]

Originally Posted by Jared

.... I've noticed that many other teams are having weird issues with long connection times on the field at NE district champs, and we usually have to restart the driver station and change our team number to another number and back before we can connect to the field....

These two approaches to getting the DS to connect to the field work because they re-initiate the mDNS process. Another way to do this is to disable then re-enable the NIC.

I hope FIRST adds a simple button to the next version of DS that will manually re-initiate the mDNS service. It would save several minutes a day.