Connection issues at regionals

[Wes2443]

Aloha, this past weekend at the Hawaii Regional our team, as well as others, experienced communication issues. As far as we know, ours is unique (not sure, could be the static problem). When we turn on the robot during a match and it boots up, the COMMs light turns green but there is no connection to the Driver Station. We also suffered from this at San Diego in Week 1 and we learned there that doing a hard reset on the RoboRIO (holding RESET button, releasing then pressing it again) reboots it then it connects to DS, solving the problem. This happened occasionally at San Diego and every match at Hawaii (and the FTA person got annoyed for the hold up). In San Diego this happened in the pit too which rules out the FMS but it happened little in Hawaii's pits. We are pretty sure its not due to wires disconnecting because we don't lose connection after getting hit.

Our mentor said it could be due to the RIO starting up before the Radio can fully boot up. When we turned on the radio the four lights lit up but then shut off for a second, then started turning on again light it was rebooting. Other than the manual reset on the RoboRIO on the field, we had somewhat success turning on the robot before placing it on the field, depending on whether we plugged in the ethernet in the driver station laptop early or not. We already tried two separate RoboRIOs and Radios and the problem still persisted.

If anyone knows why this happens or a possible solution that would really help. Could this be a hardware problem on the RoboRIO or the Radio? We program in Java and we ran with all components (other than the driver station which we had to change to dynamic at Hawaii) on static IPs (i.e. Axis Camera and RoboRIO). Thanks.

P.S. Possibly a non-related problem, but during our Semi-finals match at Hawaii we intermittently lost connection when they were about to start which apparently reset our code/rio somehow, re-setting our autonomous selection though it still displayed on the SmartDashboard, and we were not able to re-set it. We don't think something in our code that ran killed the process. The FTA person said we had constant link to the robot the whole time but on the driver station there was a definite loss of communication for about a second right before they started the match. We aren't fully sure why this occurred also.