Driver Station Blank Screen, Anyone have the same problem?

[Travis Hoffman]

Originally Posted by Lowfategg

Wow, its that easy to brick a drivers station? I think FIRST is going to have a few of these on its hands.

I think we should avoid speculating about things that may or may not come to pass related to the Driver Station. I think we should instead focus on providing constructive commentary directly related to the original poster's request for assistance in this thread, similar to what Alan provided. On top of that, let's provide some assistance and clarification to teams who have yet to undertake this procedure to help minimize the risk of a similar occurrence happening to their hardware.

First of all, it's been mentioned elsewhere, but the Table of Contents of Chapter 5 does not jive with the actual sections of the document. There is no Section 5.1 "Introduction" as referenced in the TOC, so all the TOC references are incremented one section higher than what is actually in the document. This is a trivial fix that should be made and reposted to the FIRST Control System webpage immediately. To those working very hard on the development and support of this new system and its related documentation, let's scour the existing published material and fix these minor errors, please. Let's also dot the I's and cross the T's of future documentation before releasing it publicly, please. Please don't risk wasting teams' precious time, and please don't make your support jobs harder by adding unneeded confusion to the process.

Documented Firmware Upgrade Process

Please refer to Section 5.1.1 (in the main document body, avoiding the Table of Contents)

Originally Posted by Section 5.1.1 of the Control System Manual

8. The firmware upgrade will proceed automatically. Do NOT interrupt this process by cutting
power to the Driver Station, inserting/removing any cables from the Driver Station, touching any
of the I/O pins, etc. The firmware upgrade takes approximately 3 minutes to complete.
9. The Driver Station will automatically reboot upon completion of the firmware upgrade.

So to the OP - you mentioned you may not have waited 3 minutes. Why did you choose to abort before the minimum duration specified in the instructions?

Step 9 indicates that the Driver Station should reboot once the firmware load is complete. Not having performed the exercise myself yet, it seems that the reboot would be a positive reinforcement that the firmware update has completed and that you should leave the Driver Station alone until the reboot occurs (or until a period of time much greater than 3 minutes goes by without any reboot occurring).

Can someone who has completed this process successfully please tell all of us what the Driver Station does when the firmware load is complete? What does a reboot "look" like when it occurs? What happens on the LCD screen? It sounds like this is the only form of feedback during the upgrade process - I presume nothing is displayed on the LCD that indicates the update progress while the transfer is taking place ("XX bytes of XX total copied", or something similar). If this is true.....can this be addressed in a later firmware release to give teams more feedback that something "good" is happening DURING the firmware upgrade?