So this is an odd problem that we haven’t even begun to get an edge on. I’m hoping this is one of those simple issues that you just can’t find on google because of the wording.
Basically, what’s happening is when we turn the robot on, the driver station sees the bridge and not the cRIO. Even after half hour of waiting, it still doesn’t see the cRIO until I walk up to the robot and push the reset button on the unit its self. At that point we’re online in about 10-20 seconds.
I’m concerned about what we’ll do in competition, clearly we won’t be able to run onto the field to get to the reset button.
The root issue is that the cIO and other robot devices are booting in parallel and may bring up their network communications at different times. When the cRIO finishes booting before the wifi bridge does, the bridge doesn’t know how to route the DS control packets to the cRIO. The updated DS detects that the robot is not responding and send out an arp reset. This causes the router to rebuild its tables and learn how to route to the cRIO.
The update was just recently made available on the ni.com/first site. I assume an official announcement will go out early next week.
I didn’t get a chance to try those, but I did have that installed on my laptop when we were testing today and we didn’t have this issue once. I’ll have to update the DS Netbook on Monday.