Driver Station/RoboRIO communication issues

[NathanCJohnson]

We've been having a couple different communications issues. The first one is that whenever we turn off the robot and turn it back on the laptop has to be restarted in order for the Driver Station program to connect again. It seems to be an mDNS issue because when this happens the Wi-Fi still connects and I am able to ping 10.55.17.2 (roborio IP) but am unable to ping roborio-5517-frc.local (it does work once I restart the computer, though). I am worried this might be an issue at our week 2 competition.

The second issue we discovered today at the Kettering practice/demo event: when connected it would keep momentarily dropping communication ("No Robot Communication") and then reconnecting -- whether it was disabled or enabled. In one of the matches our robot dropped comms and reconnected and then drove forward very fast by itself as if the joystick values queued up and then all fired at once when it reconnected. It hit the castle wall of the opposing alliance pretty hard. We definitely do not want that to happen at our actual competitions.

This event didn't have an FMS so everyone was connecting directly from their driver station to the robot, so this problem may have been due to all the robot Wi-Fi networks in the small area. I'm not sure though.

This year seems really bad for communications for us. Last year we barely had any problems and had everything up and running fine. I really don't know if it is to do with the RoboRIO/radio or the PC but this does worry me quite a bit.

Has anyone else had these issues and solved them? I don't have access to our robot right now and it is bagged again, so won't be able to test anything right now. But we will be using part of our 6 hour unbag time next week for cleaning up some wiring, finish programming, and fixing issues, so I will be able to try any solutions/suggestions then.

Thanks.