yet another connection issue thread

[Greg McKaskle]

When you say "our communications light was going in and out" I assume you mean the overall Communications status light on the left was blinking off and on. Did you go to the Diagnostics page to see if there were errors or what the other LEDs showed? The Communications LED indicates that the overall system is working. The other LEDs represent lower and lower levels and would hopefully indicate what was failing.

When you say "our cRio rebooted twice but had full communication between reboots", that cannot mean the Communications light was on. What does that refer to?

Hopefully this will not happen again, but here are a few observations that may help. If the robot stops communicating but the RSL is still on, the cRIO is still on and it is usually the radio that lost power or connection. If the connection comes back 30 of 40 seconds later, it is probably the power to the radio. If the connection comes back 15 to 20 seconds later, that is the boot time of the cRIO, so check the power there.

Finally, I didn't hear you say anything about ethernet cables. You may want to observe the lights while wiggling the enet cables, particularly around the connectors. Also make sure your bridge isn't buried in the robot so that the antennae is blocked.

Greg McKaskle