We were running our robot tethered directly from our laptop to the CRIO II, we think that the ethernet port is broken. The robot was working perfectly and we had been test driving for a while, then the robot stopped working, but intermittently. We tried several different ethernet cables with no luck. We are now going back to the old CRIO. Is there any way to get either a replacement through NI before our first competition on 03/08?
Almost certainly. But I often see teams driving rather aggressively with a tether. Unless it is prohibited like in the pits, I’d encourage you to get the wireless up and running early. It is good to debug it before a competition, and it is less damaging to yank a wifi connection out of the robot.
Greg McKaskle
How would we go about getting a replacement? Contact NI directly? Today was the first day we were not having trouble with our bridge and we had just switch to wireless for the first time today. Wireless wasn’t working so smoothly so just for driving practice we reconnected the direct ethernet connection. We always had someone holding the tether to control the slack, but there may have been an occasion where the tether was too taut.
Contact NI here https://decibel.ni.com/content/community/first/frc?view=discussions or via the phone number.
Greg McKaskle
In future, add a port extender to the cRIO and tie a loop of it down to the chassis, so no tension is put on the cRIO port when it gets yanked…
It the end of that gets destroyed it’s cheap to replace.