Serious OI problems

[Arrowsmith]

When it came time to power up the bot, we ran into a serious problem with the OI. For some reason, both radios flash on standby, with no data transfer between the OI and RC. In fact, with the exeption of the power light, none of the lights on the OI light up during startup. Did any of you run into this?

[Alan Anderson]

I believe you need to set the team number by tethering first, before the OI and RC will communicate by radio.

[Arrowsmith]

we did all that. It was working before, but it isnt now.

[HuskieRobotics]

Did you use the dashboard program to see if the 2 signals numbers were the same???

[Arrowsmith]

The dashboard isn't recieving any information either. The connection times out every time we plug it in.

[miketwalker]

Hmm, how about fuses? I forget if they replaced them with self-resetting circuit breakers this year... but if they haven't, check the fuse.

[steven114]

I would suggest calling IFI if you can't solve this in a few days - some of the lights should light up. For example, the radio lights and backup battery lights and such.

[Arrowsmith]

After trying three times to call IFI, we learned that the processor in the oi was blown. this is unfortunate, as we are going to the Pittsburgh regional tomarrow. Hopefully we can get a replacement overnighted to the Events Center. Thanks for your help.

[Chris Hibner]

Did you "upgrade" to the new IFI firmware and loader? We had a similar problem after "upgrading". The default code would work, but all of our other code (that was working with the old firmware and loader) would just hang up. We wasted 6 hours at VCU trying to figure this out. The big problem turned out to be the loader.

Be forwarned that the new upgrades may have unexpected affects on your code. One example: at the beginning of autonomous mode, our gearboxes would shift into neutral (and then we couldn't get them into gear in auto-mode since we can't shift on the fly). This resulted in us sitting still for almost all of our autonomous periods. We finally found the problem after our last match of the regional, but the root cause was the new firmware slightly changed the way the servos worked (of course, everything worked just fine with the old firmware).

Anyway, the point is: beware of the upgrade.