User code won't download/run-possible causes?

Technical C/C++
1

Hoping someone can shed some light on this,

Today we were trying to download our program to the cRio, and were unable to get it either to download or to run(we’re not 100% sure where the problem lies). Basically, whenever we use the “deploy” option in FIRST downloader, the progress bar just flashes on the screen, and when we reboot the cRio it does nothing and we get a “no code” warning. The odd thing is that using the “undeploy” option doesn’t generate an error, so the cRio thinks it has something loaded. Additionally, we can download the example programs and they work fine. START_ROBOT_CLASS is calling our frcv1 class, and the network connection works fine.

Based on the testing we’ve done, we think that either

  1. The build specification is wrong, since our program is showing up as “PPC32diab”, but the example shows up as “PPC32gnu”
  2. There’s some other option that we have to set in order to get the program to run on startup(other than the START_ROBOT_CLASS one)
  3. FIRST downloader doesn’t like our binary and is failing silently

Does anyone have any ideas on what might be the most likely, or something else that might be going wrong?

2

The only other thing I can think of is that your robot class needs to inherit either SimpleRobot or IterativeRobot, but other than that there shouldn’t be any other steps. Perhaps WindRiver didn’t install correctly?

3

My class is:

class frcv1 : public IterativeRobot

Which I have 5 nines of confidence is right. Does anyone know if there’s some other option that has to be set to get code to run on startup?

4

Hook up to the serial console and see what is happening as the system boots. You will get helpful messages as your program is attempting to load.

Also, your issue #1 is suspect. It should be PPC32gnu.

I’d suggest making a new project in windriver starting from the simple robot example, as explained in the control system docs. Nuke the example source code file and copy in your sources. Build the project. This should rule out anything wrong in the project build settings.

If that works, simply rename the project to a name of your choice.

Oh, and if you take this route, be sure to update the FIRST downloader settings (Window->Preferences) to point to the NEW binary in the NEW project. It will not update automatically and you’ll just be downloading your old project build.

5