Serial port on CRIO-FRC II

FIRST General Forum
1

We are having trouble opening the RS232 serial port on the new CRIO-FRC II. Using the exact same code, we were able to successfully open the port and use read/writes on the older 8-slot CRIO-FRC version 1. However, with the new 2012 4-slot version we are seeing an error upon initialization:

Using port: ASRL1::INSTR
error code: -1073807246

We have tried the NI serial port VISA module as well as the WPI version, with similar failures. Has anyone else encountered this problem?

Thank you

2

Not really sure what the answer is, but I looked up the error code (you can do that in Help->Explain Error) and got:

Error -1073807246 occurred at an unidentified location

Possible reason(s):

VISA:  (Hex 0xBFFF0072) The resource is valid, but VISA cannot currently access it.
3

Judging by the error text in the post above, I would guess you need to turn Console Out off with the imaging tool.

4

Do you have your cRIO imaged properly? Have you started a new project for this year?

5

THanks RufflesRidge! You were right. We used the imaging tool to change the console setting and it worked.

6

Question: for connecting a computer to the serial port on the cRIO, does it require a basic serial cord, or a null modem cord?

7

Null Modem. However, I haven’t connected to the cRIO serial port recently, because netconsole makes me lazy.

8

Ok, thank you, we picked up a null modem cable adapter at our local Radio Shack. Does anyone know how to read in values from the serial port on the cRIO? We are using HyperTerminal to emulate a device that will send data to the cRIO via serial port. We know that the HyperTerminal is sending the data, and we know that the data is successfully being transferred down the cable. We are using C++ and we have yet to figure out the logic to reading the values from the buffer with the Read method.

9

**The console setting for serial out is:
**
9600 - BAUD
8 - Data Bits
None - Parity
**1 - **Stop Bit
None - Flow Control

10

Ok, thank you. After about 5 hours of sitting down and messing around with the serial port code in WindRiver we finally got it working.

11

9 600 baud over RS-232? I suddenly feel 20 years younger!

12

9600 baud is just the default value. The cRIO can handle up to roughly 230,000 baud.