Windows 8 FMS Support?

Technical Control System
1

We were having trouble using our Windows 8 machine (approved last night on the FMS here) on the FMS this morning and we were told that Windows 8 is not supported and that therefore we would have to switch back to Windows ? - in our case, Windows XP.
Any experience with fixing this or official Windows 8 support would be appreciated.
Thx,
Martin

2

I am having a lot of trouble finding out where it said that windows 8 was supported right now, but I remember seeing that it was supported.

Who ever told you that you needed to switch back is not right. You do not have to run it on windows xp/7 there is no requirement.

If it was people relaying information saying that your computer was not working with the FMS then that is a different issue.

EDIT Found this taken from the FRC Blog:

2014 Operating System Support

The Control System software we’re releasing for the 2014 season has been tested and will be officially supported on Windows 7 and Windows 8. The software has not been certified to work on Windows XP. This doesn’t mean it won’t work, just that we can’t guarantee it, and we won’t be able to provide anything beyond cursory support if you decide to use it.

http://www.usfirst.org/roboticsprograms/frc/Awards-and-2014-Operating-System-Support

3

This week I saw a number of laptops that were difficult to get attached to the field. It wasn’t a Windows 8 issue, though there was some speculation that it was involved.

The field requires that the laptop be set to 10.te.am.05 and subnet of 255.0.0.0 on the LAN adapter. If the subnet is wrong, you may hear from the field, but the field will not hear you back and the FMS lights will show your DS as a red dot. It must be .05 or the field will info will not get to you.

Some computers had like half a dozen wireless adapters in the control panel. Disabling the adapters is a good start, but you would then go to configure the LAN and Windows would warn that something else was already on .05. The dialog was confusing and Yes wouldn’t apply and it wasn’t clear if No did or not.

You may want to use IPConfig to verify that the settings of the LAN are correct after pressing No on the dialog.

To avoid the dialog, please visit the wireless adapter(s) and change them so they are not .05 before disabling. To make matters more confusing. One laptop dialog referred to a VPN adapter that wasn’t present in the control panel.

Greg McKaskle

4

Thanks for the quick and useful replies!

5

I’ve seen this many times over the past two weeks. Here are my recommendations.

  • Ensure the drivers station software is ran as an administrator - this allows it to automatically set the IP address
  • Press Choose Nic from setup, make sure your ethernet controller is selected for wired and your wireless controller is selected for wireless. - many teams have one or both set to manual, I recommend against this since you may have something set incorrectly if you do it yourself. As a note, this will also take care of IP address conflicts between the two adapters
  • Disable all other NICs in your network adapters settings. This includes Bluetooth (you don’t need it on the field), Hamachi, VirtualBox, VMWare, etc.
  • Plug your laptop into power before you wake it up - this is critical. Many laptops turn off the Ethernet port when it is not in use and is running on battery to save power. There is a setting deep in the driver to disable this, but the better solution is to bring your charger with you and plug it in.
6

Eric,
Thanks for your ideas. We’ll add them to our checklist.
Best,
Martin