No Robot Communications

[alex42]

Our cRIO suddenly stopped communicating. I was running new code as a startup (we use LabVIEW by the way) and the deployment failed twice due to losing connection with the cRIO (which was odd in itself). The third time it succeeded, but when it rebooted the DS didn't get any communication from it. After rebooting it a few times, I tried pressing the reset button on the cRIO, since so many teams are having the problem where the cRIO boots before the wireless bridge, and the way to solve that is apparently to press the cRIO's reset button. That didn't work though, even after trying it repeatedly interspersed with more reboots. Until now, the only wireless connection issue we had had was initially, when we got a sporadic connection since we had some IP addresses set wrong. So I tried tethering the DS to the cRIO. In fact, I tried it with both of the crossover cables we have, since sometimes the wired connection will fail to work until we switch crossover cables, although which cable works varies. Through all of this, the best I could ever get was that when I was using the wireless connection and reset the cRIO, I would momentarily get "No Robot Code" before it returned to "No Robot Communications".

[alex42]

New Development: we booted the cRIO in safe mode, then back out of safe mode, and now when we boot the cRIO while it is connected by one of the crossover cables (not with the other or with wireless) it will get through the normal amount of time displaying "No Robot Code" and show "Teleop Disabled" for about a second before losing communications again. Oddly enough, during the brief time it is connected, it produces error #-63195 (The handle for device communication is invalid or has been closed. Restart the application) twice, for each of the two servos the code refers to. Once we also got the same error on the DIOs referred to, and a -44036 (An invalid set operation occurred, and the PWM channel was not allocated) from on of the servos (we've gotten that code before when we accidentally tried to open the same PWM channel twice). Everything but the servos is not plugged in, and yet most of it is not throwing any errors. The gyro especially we have never plugged in and the code always produces a stream of errors about that, but there aren't any errors about it now.

[Radical Pi]

Sounds like you have a corrupted firmware on the cRIO. If you can get a stable enough connection to it you could try re-formatting it. If you can't hold a connection you should contact National Instruments immediately for a replacement. I think the instructions were in a recent e-mail from FIRST

[alex42]

That's our plan. Since the amount of time the connection lasts is very consistent and nowhere close to long enough, so we're calling NI first thing tomorrow morning. We're just checking in case someone has a cheaper solution than getting a new cRIO.

[alex42]

It would seem we managed to get the code in an infinite loop that prevented anything else from running (such as the communications loop). Once we found out that there was a switch on the cRIO that would prevent it from running code on startup, we were able to reimage it and then the code was easy to fix. The switch is labelled something like "no app".