No Comms at the Scrimmage

[MamaSpoldi]

Today at the Suffield Shakedown we were completely unable to run because we were unable to establish communications. After having the FTA personnel (thank you to them) look at our 2 DLinks it was established that they were in working condition and configured properly. This was also confirmed by us resetting the system for another team number who agreed to try using our DLink to connect on their robot to test the bridge. However, we were unable to connect to the FMS when we used it.

To start the story at the beginning, about 1.5-2 weeks ago we were working fine using the DLink in bridge mode on our robot and continuing to use the Linksys router from 2 years ago to provide comms to our driverstation and our programming laptops. We had been waiting for a few days to get access to the robot again after further mechanical and electrical work. After what I can only refer to as an "event" that happened we were no longer able to get power to our cRIO and therefore (or possibly additionally) we were unable to communicate with it wirelessly over the DLink. The "event" in question has not been quantified per se, ie. we don't know what happened... there was no snap or crackle, there was no smoke or smell... but the system stopped working. We are lucky enough to have a 2nd cRIO and replaced the "bad" system but still no communications... it appeared that perhaps the DLink had also been effected, so we swapped it with our old bridge from 2 years ago... and miraculously it worked. So we proceeded to use that configuration for programming and testing while ordering a replacement for our DLink. The DLink arrived on Thursday and we set it up on Friday... but the new DLink gave us the same puzzling results as the first one. We were able to see the DLink wirelessly but not the cRIO on the other side of it and we were also able to see the cRIO if we plugged into the DLink with our driverstation or laptop. However this did not give us a working competition configuration. Believing that it was likely a bridge configuration issue, we headed off to the scrimmage with our fingers crossed. However, as I already said... we did not find an answer to our problems.

Just for a little more background:

• we are programming in C++ and updated to the v28 this morning to conform to that new requirement... however, after hearing of potential issues with v28 we also tried backing up to the v27 version cRIO image.
• we verified the voltage into the DLink (recognizing the old bridge uses a different voltage... therefore they are using different power cords).
• we verified the DLink is in working condition as mentioned above.
• we have the latest cRIO and driverstation updates installed.

Has anyone else seen this type of problem? Any ideas?