Death of our cRIO, and some suggestions for NI

[Chris Hibner]

Today at the Detroit district event our cRIO suffered a slow decline to its ultimate death. Actually, I don't think it's completely dead, but at least the power connector doesn't work leaving it dead for all intents and purposes. The slow decline (intermittent problems) caused us to sit stationary for 20-30 seconds in a match or two, and the death caused us to sit still for the entire match after our first kick (the shock inflicted the final blow).

I've been very supportive of NI and the new control system, but I have some constructive criticism here. I don't want this to become a "piling on" thread, but I have one suggestion that would have saved us from missing a match.

Once we decided we needed to swap the cRIO, we had to get a loaner, which means we had to re-image the cRIO to set it up with our team number. Issues with the imaging process cost us about 40 minutes and we finally decided that the loaner cRIO wasn't working, so we had to go to a SECOND loaner. All of this wasted time caused us to miss a match altogether. With some simple changes, we could have easily saved 30 minutes and we wouldn't have missed the match.

Sorry for the long backgroud, here's the rub:

The cRIO Imaging Tool needs a status bar

if that wasn't clear,

THE CRIO IMAGING TOOL NEEDS A STATUS BAR

During the re-imaging process, the tool got to the "Formatting the cRIO" part, and sat there saying that for a long time. Without some sort of status bar, we had no idea if the process was still working, it was hung up, the cRIO crashed, etc. If we could see a) a status bar that stopped moving, or b) some type of "still working" feedback like what you get when a web page is loading, we would have known that the process was stuck.

Considering how long it takes to reformat the cRIO (and how much time pressure we were under), we didn't want to cancel the process and start over, especially if it was this close to being done. But without a status bar, we had NO IDEA.

We finally wound up canceling the operation, trying the safe mode thing, and that hung up as well (at least we assume it hung up, but we had no way of telling without a status bar (does anyone see the common theme here)).

Anyway, after 40 minutes of frustration, we finally decided that it was time to get ANOTHER cRIO. That one imaged without issue.

Once again, here's my beef: if we had a status bar, we probably would've noticed it frozen within the first 2 minutes. We could've tried it again, noticed it frozen, then got another cRIO. That would've saved us at least 30 minutes, and we wouldn't have missed a match.

I know that the tone may seem a little angry, but it really isn't. I'm actually keeping fairly light-hearted about the whole deal, all things considered. So, if you came away thinking I'm furious, re-read this post with a sarcastic yet light-hearted mindset.

Anyway: Status bar - PLEASE.