Problem receiving console output from cRIO

[Arborama]

We are having much difficulty in receiving console output from the robot. We attempted to use the LabView dashboard; the example code using the SimpleRobot class ran fine and we cold see the robot's output. We then tried to use the code from the LabView example in our code, which uses IterativeRobot. When we tried to run this, we were unable to view the output from our robot when dashboard.Printf(""); is invoked.

Our next method we used was the serial interface - we hooked up the serial cable (tether from last year) to a USB dongle (our laptops don't have serial ports) and the cRIO. We configured HyperTerminal as per the instructions in the documentation (5.4.1.2 I think), but we don't receive any data at all. We have made sure the CONSOLE OUT DIP switch is on, and we power cycled after switching it, but still nothing. We are not sure what a "null modem" cable is, and we don't know if this is the main issue in this case (others have mentioned an adapter?) Our code just has a printf("Hello World!"); in the auton periodic function, which should flood the console with greetings - no such luck.

We followed the instructions in the document "Robot Programming with the WPI Robotics library," and tried connecting to a remote target. We receive an error message with the number, "196709."

We have already re-imaged to the latest firmware. Everything else we want to do with the robot is working fine; all we are trying to do is receive information from our robot through the console. Has anybody encountered similar problems and found ways around them, or has anybody had luck with a certain method of communicating with the robot?

Sorry for the long post, and thank you in advance for any help.