I can’t seem to find the good comprehensive documentation like in years past on the FIRST or NI site about crio, driver station, etc… I can only find basics getting started. If someone can point me in that direction, I’d be much appreciative.
(if you don’t want to read story, questions are at end)
Yesterday I was working on re-downloading our old logomotion code compiled for 2012 on a v43 formatted crio for an upcoming school open house demo. First try I downloaded and rebooted successfully, but when I enabled, the jaguars (On CAN bus) did not enable, except the last one. I presses the space bar to disable, but to my shock, horror, and dismay, it is the new estop button AND the reboot robot button is disabled, so I had to power cycle the robot manually (not fun).
Upon the next boot up and enable, the can system worked, but no motor commands were being sent (strange, since it was our final working code on same robot from last year), so I added a few printfs and commented out unneeded code. Re-dowloaded a few times with more printfs, etc, and rebooted. Then the Symptoms started.
It was taking a while to come back up, so I checked Ethernet cables, and rebooted full robot stack. It still did not come up after 5 minutes, so I direct plugged into crio (bypassing switch), which still did not work. after unplugging unnecessary-to-drive systems, making sure necessary systems were plugged in, and battery was ok, I rebooted robot stack again.
Still nothing.
I flipped the safe mode dip switch (cRIO I) and rebooted, and it came up. I re-imaged it, turned off safe mode, and rebooted. Still nothing.
I watched the netconsole, which stayed empty (no pings either)
I watched the status lights above the dip switches, and found that the “Status” light was slow blinking yellow.
So, #1 what is the key to disable the robot? (last year was spacebar) #2 what does this yellow blinking “Status” (above “User” light) light mean?
Enter is the new disable.
-During the beta test, we brought up the issue of accidental e-stops, but the FRC/NI people would not consider changing the e-stop/disable mapping to be consistent with past years.
No help here
If you can’t get it to do anything, you can format the cRio in NI MAX (Measurement and Automation Explorer) - find the cRio and “Format Disk”.
Every year FIRST changes the navigation of the documentation and it seems to get harder to find.
From the FRC page go to Game and Season Info–>Competition Manual–>Kit of Parts. Then use the links on the right side to navigate the various documentation pages. I had to look at the page a couple of times to figure this out, since it’s not intuitive.
Most of the Java and C++ progamming related documentation is on FIRST Forge under the WPILib project. There must be links to this in the other documents on the Kit of Parts site, because I had to remember this from last year.
Update: safe mode does not work either now.
Status light sequence:
[power on]
[power light on]
half second delay
status light on
waits 3 or 4 seconds
status light off
one second delay
status blink
one second
status blink
one second
status blink
etc…
I found this for the FRC-cRIO 1 by doing a google search, the FRC II docs is on the NI Community
STATUS LED
The STATUS LED is off during normal operation. The cRIO-FRC
indicates specific error conditions by flashing the STATUS LED a certain
number of times as shown in Table 3.
USER1 LED
You can define the USER1 LED to meet the needs of your application. To
define the LED, use the RT LEDs VI in LabVIEW. For more information
about the RT LEDs VI, refer to the LabVIEW Help.
Table 3. Status LED Indications
Number of Flashes Indication
1 The chassis is unconfigured. Use MAX to configure the chassis. Refer
to the Measurement & Automation Explorer Help for information about
configuring the chassis.
2 The chassis has detected an error in its software. This usually occurs
when an attempt to upgrade the software is interrupted. Reinstall
software on the chassis. Refer to the Measurement & Automation
Explorer Help for information about installing software on the chassis.
3 The chassis is in safe mode because the SAFE MODE DIP switch is in
the ON position. Refer to the Configuring DIP Switches section for
information about the Safe Mode DIP switch.
4 The software has crashed twice without rebooting or cycling power
between crashes. This usually occurs when the chassis runs out of
memory. Review your RT VI and check the memory usage. Modify
the VI as necessary to solve the memory usage issue.
Continuous flashing or solid
The device may be configured for DHCP but unable to get an IP address
because of a problem with the DHCP server. Check the network
connection and try again. If the problem persists, contact National
Instruments.
I had the same problem like a day ago. I resolved it just by tinkering with the imaging tool. First I imaged it with safemode and ipreset dip switches on. But then I imaged it with all the dip switches on except for safemode which I left off. Then it worked perfectly. What your cause for the safemode and crazy lights is basically that your cRIO root files are corrupt and that is why it’s causing your cRIO to go into safemode and act crazy. It needs imaging. After what I did above I didn’t have any problems after that. I had to play around. I’m sure you can resolve it as well. It just takes a while and makes your head hurt.
Yes, it definately makes your head hurt and I suffered early last year. When I finally figured out how I got it to work every time, I made it into a guide and I follow the guide to the point.