No Robot Communication

Hello CD,

We are experiencing difficulty in communicating with our robot. We are setting it up for a demonstration at our State Fair. We are working with a Classmate that has been restored via the included Restoration Key flash drive. We have followed the Bench Top tutorial for setting up the router. We are using the WRT160N Linksys router. We have fully updated Labview and the DS. We can run teleop when tethered however when we attempt to connect wirelessly we recieve an message that says to check the communications between the DS Radio and the Controller. We have tried replacing the ethernet cable between the Bridge and Port 1 on the cRio with a ethernet cable that we know to be working.

When setting up the bridge, did you make sure to follow the note under step 8 of 2.10.1?

Our router does not give the to change the 802.11 band. It is the Rookie router.

Check to make sure the router and bridge are communicating…the top light on the bridge should be solid (or pretty close, blinking once in a while, but not a steady blink). This is the light with the 3 curved arcs.

Yes, the router and bridge are communicating.

Try pinging 10.21.69.2 to see if the robot and ds are on the same subnet, etc.

We have to reset the bridge via the physical reset button and tried to access the bridge via its default IP address: 192.168.1.250 with no success.

Have you checked that the cable to the router is tight? The ports on the classmate are known to break (we have to duct-tape our cable in)

yes we have checked the cables and the ports many times over.

I’m not sure if it’s possible, but do you have a second bridge you can test it with?

Also, how long did you wait to recieve communications after turning the robot on? We found that the bootup time on the newer bridge is much longer than the old one.

Is the wireless bridge still encrypted from competition? You can change this at its http config page by going to 10.21.69.1 (not sure if that’s correct) and turning off the WPA encryption if I recall correctly. We had to do this after North Star for a demo we did for the school board.

That this would be your problem seems somewhat unlikely since the reconfiged router and bridge are communicating. It seems however that the bridge is the source of the problem since teleop worked fine when tethered. Finding a second bridge to test would verify this, and then if it works you can just forget about the first one.

I think we are going down to MN Fair tomorrow or Tuesday to ship our bot, so we might be able to check it out if you wanted.

when you tethered the robot, did you tether directly to the classmate or to the router? If you went to the classmate, try tethering to the router and take the bridge completely out of the equation

Luke - If you need any direct help, I’m in the area :slight_smile: If it would be easy, I could meet you at our build space in St. Paul on your way to the Fair and get it set up. Just send me a message on here and we’ll get something figured out. I’ve got plenty of experience getting these things working (and not just our teams).

Yes, the rookie router doesn’t have the option to change the band… but the gaming adapter bridge (the wireless part that stays on the robot) does. With the rookie router, you need to ensure you have “2.4GHz” set on the bridge, or the two can’t connect.