I tried to connect directly to the pi with an ethernet cable and it doesn’t connect. Should I be able to use an Ethernet cable directly to the pi or do I need to use a simple hub? My laptop doesn’t have the driver station on it, do I need that? I tried firefox, too. We are using the 2109.1.1 image and will move to 2.1 today. We found that the base image is tied to team 294 and we changed it to our team. Do I need to enable the console somehow? I forgot to look for that. (that’s not written anywhere) It does connect to the rio and we can stream the camera image but we’re trying to filter now and need to get on the camera server. any tips? thx
I had the same problem. Never got it to work with http://frcvision.local but I was able to bring up the page using the ip address of the pi.
Since frcvision.local is an mDNS entry you’ll only be able to get there if it’s plugged into the robot radio. If you plug it into any network it’ll pick up a DHCP address and you can access it that way. Since I was testing on a home network I control it’s easy to see the IP handed to the pi in that instance. If you’re somewhere like a school using the guest WiFi you’ll need to connect the pi up to a monitor using HDMI and see what IP it ends up snagging, and simply supply that to your browser. Connecting a cable between your laptop and pi didn’t work for me (it might, but I wasn’t spending time to mess with it).
The easy solutions are to plug it into the robot radio. Second best is a network you control, which excludes a dumb switch that isn’t handing out DNS.
It will connect directly to a computer, as it gets a link-local address. mDNS seems to often have issues on Windows (this applies to the roboRio as well). Installing iTunes can help because that installs the Apple mDNS responder (Bonjour) in place of the Windows one. On a network with a DHCP server http://frcvision.lan may be worth trying as well.
Once you are connected once, you can set a static IP in the web dashboard.
For me on 2019.1.1 it just would not pick up an address with a normal patch cable between Pi and PC. It ended up with 169.x.x.x. I’ve got a lot of crap on this machine though and it’s pretty far outside the norm for what it’s worth. Placing the Pi on a network should be fairly straight forward for most folks one would assume.
It sounded like it did pick up an address then – 169.x.x.x is the link local address. Did your PC also have a link-local address assigned? If so, you should have been able to ping from one to the other; the only issue was that mDNS wasn’t working so the .local name didn’t resolve.
FWIW, there weren’t any changes to networking in 2019.2.1.
The other trick is that if you do have it connected to a Rio and the streams are working, you can use OutlineViewer to find the IP address of the Pi (it’s part of the streams key for each camera).
Nope, 169 is a trash address that doesn’t really go anywhere. It should really be somewhere in the range of 172.x or 10.x or 192.x. 169 seems to be what you get when the hardware throws its hands up and throws a dart and hopes for the best. I did try and browse to that IP, but it didn’t return back a result.
It’s not a trash address, it’s an address provided via a standard process known as link-local addressing. The other address ranges you listed are common DHCP ranges for private networks. Yes, link local addressing is what the IP stack does when there is no DHCP server available, but it does work. It’s how teams commonly connect directly to their RoboRio’s with Ethernet directly from a PC. However, the addresses are not predictable, which is why mDNS is necessary, and both sides need to fall back to link-local addresses for it to work.
Are you running Windows or some other OS? On most desktop Linux systems, I’ve found it necessary to set the port explicitly link-local, but then after that mDNS works fine.
On Windows you can just adjust the hosts file to account for any of the .local name resolution, or yes, find a copy of Bonjour (easily found in iTunes installers).
You can also provide a lot of configuration details in the the headless provisioning process of the Pi. Rob Graham provides some great detail on his blog: Provisioning a Raspberry Pi
I will add that the FRCVision image specifically puts the network configuration file (dhcpcd.conf) in /boot so it’s accessible from Windows systems. After imaging the SD card, you can mount the SD card and edit this file to change the IP settings. This isn’t entirely compatible with the web dashboard (as the web dashboard doesn’t fully parse the file) but works in a pinch.
Windows 10. I’ll preface my previous comment by saying that, in my experience, if a device ends up with an address starting with 169 things have gone off the rails and something is not working properly. If using a patch cable between the Pi and a desktop/laptop works for others that is fantastic. Especially as it’s not always convenient to cart around a monitor that supports HDMI.
In traditional networking, that could be true. However, there is an RFC standard out there that defines non-routable IP networking as Link-local, which is what those 169.154.x.x addresses that you see. It is designed only to communicate with other hosts within the same broadcast domain, which is to say, within your own local network. Hence, the link-local name.
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