The other day the students configured the radio for home use according to the steps here. However, we’ve been trying to connect to the radio, and it consistently drops packets at a regular rate. This makes usage impossible, because the connection fails around 5-7 times per minute. I’ve tried on battery power and an AC power adapter, as well as on two different computers and the problem persists. There’s a Jetson TK1 connected to the 802.3af POE port and the roboRIO is attached to the 18-24v POE port. I’ve attached a screenshot of the Driver Station with the chart showing the loss of communication.
P.S. The FRC.lan team number is actually roboRIO-2576-FRC.lan, because the OM5P-AN has a different suffix for mDNS addresses, which causes problems with connecting to the roboRIO with the Driver Station.
The Team Number field is used only to get the IP. Once established, it has no effect. When I’ve seen this, it is typically some service or setting on the laptop/OS. One thing to do is to open the task manager and see if there is a noticeable bump in some process at the same period as the packet loss. This could be a virus scan, a disk indexing for search, or an update program from Microsoft, Autodesk, etc.
Another thing that some folks see is the wifi interface scanning channels, looking for other APs. I’m not sure the best way to prevent that, and I don’t think the interruption should be as frequent or as long as yours.
Also, if you plug the ethernet into the laptop, what does that look like. It will take out the channel scan, but still be affected by update programs and the like.
After posting, I noticed my computer couldn’t even connect to the radio because the WiFi network wouldn’t appear. I restarted and started troubleshooting.
I could connect to the radio with Ethernet and not experience any problems, but that somehow killed my WiFi connection with my home network and I couldn’t connect to the internet while I had the cable in.
So I started by seeing if I had any programs on my computer that could affect communication. Akamai was disabled, so if couldn’t be what other people suggested on other threads. I uninstalled VMWare and VirtualBox just to be sure it wasn’t the three extra network adapters that were confusing the Driver Station.
I still couldn’t see the network on WiFi, so I loaded up the FRC Radio Configuration Utility (after checking that there was nothing weird on the router by entering its status page). Instead of simply configuring the radio, I loaded the firmware again to completely reset it. I then configured it, but using only the 2.4GHz AP mode and the country as USA (I had previously used 2.4GHz + 5GHz AP and Chile) and let the utility do its thing. Afterwards, I had no problem connecting to the radio without even needing a restart and can ping both the roboRIO and the Jetson TK1.
I’ve attached screenshots of the DS running on Ethernet, WiFI and WiFi to the AP and Ethernet to my home network. The only thing which has seemed odd is the screenshot of Task Manager, which shows the WiFi network constantly oscillating with a nearly constant pattern. Is this normal?
TL;DR: Uninstalled extra network adapters, reflashed AP, reconfigured with USA and 2.4GHz AP mode
Do you have Autodesk Application Manager running? We had a similar problem, and only killing Autodesk Application Manager from the taskmanger fixed this for us.
