Installing FRC Driver Station without USB Key

[dagronlund]

My team is new to FRC and are trying to learn the robot tools and equipment this summer before the 2013 FRC season. Another team has loaned us a robot to use and we have gotten our cRIO controller. However we don't have the USB key that contains the tools like the FRC driver station and have instead had to download the tools off the internet. Our problem is that apparently the installers we have gotten are incomplete or broken because when we start the driver station it complains that we don't have a number of dll's, specifically one called nivision.dll. We can download and run programs on the robot even without these files, but it doesn't allow us to receive camera input and we are not sure what other problems are being caused because we don't have these files. Since next season will be our first FRC season we don't have the flash key with the necessary files. Is there any online downloads for the contents of the flash drive or have any other teams found ways to get the necessary files to make the driver station work? Any help would be appreciated.

--
Live Long and Prosper
David Gronlund

[daniel_dsouza]

This link is a bit obscure (hard to find in search), but it has what you need. It is recent enough that the person who can give you Labview will still have it online.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=107162

I could also give you a copy, if you can find a way for me to send you a 4GB .zip file online.

Our team had a similar problem in 2011, where we would hunt down one .dll, only to have the (new) driverstation tell us we were missing another!

Good Luck, and Welcome to FRC!

[stingray27]

Hello,

Since next year will be your first year, you must be using a normal laptop correct? The classmate PC is the only thing that requires the Flash drive to install the driver station. The rest can be found on the National Instruments website. Or http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprogr...river-station/. The instructions for downloading the correct files can be found in one of those web addresses. As for the missing driver file, I do not know, and hope someone else can mention something about it.

[apalrd]

I believe he is talking about the LabVIEW flash disk that was in the KOP this year (it was about credit-card sized)

The Driver Station should work fine with only the LabVIEW runtime (if you managed to run the driver station, you have the runtime) - I believe the only other components it needs are lvinput.dll which is included in the installer.

The Dashboard uses components in NI IMAQ (Image Management and Acquisition), which is probably in nivision.dll (NI Vision is the vision processing library which we use to do a lot of image analysis in real-time, IMAQ is probably a subset of it).

Assuming it's the only missing DLL, then you will only lack the camera image.

What development environment are you using? See if you can get the LabVIEW installer from your mentor team. If you install it, you should have nivision.