At our last competition we had a bunch of issues connecting our robot to our driver station laptop in the pits and at the events practice field over both USB and ethernet. On multiple occasions, it took 2 minutes to connect. Does anyone know why this may be happening, how to fix it or what we should try?
Thank you,
~Team 2906The roboRIO and the Radio both need to boot up after you turn your robot on. The radio takes about 60 seconds, well the RIO can take up to a minute thirty.
To speed up connect time, You should check that Windows Firewall is disabled on your DS and the Wifi adapter is disabled.
You can also try setting a static IP on the DS. (10.TE.AM.5) (use a /24 subnet.)
For you it should look like this
Hope this helps
For Ethernet static IPs, you need to use a /8 subnet (255.0.0.0) on the DS for competition, or it won’t be able to talk to the FMS (you will make your FTA/FTAA/CSA unhappy when they have to fix it on your computer). See http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/currentCS/m/24193/l/319135
USB tethering is typically quite fast, but you will need to wait for the RIO to boot.
I believe you need a /8 subnet (255.0.0.0) so that you can communicate with FMS if you go the static IP address route.
[Edit] Peter beat me to it! 
The roboRIO should take about 30 seconds to start up, and the radio takes about 90s. Two minutes is a long time, and is probably indicative of some problem. If it also took this long when tethered via USB, my first guess would be that your code is taking a long time to load. I would go through robotInit() or Start.vi and make sure you’re not doing calculations that would take a long time to complete there. If you don’t find anything you might want to try reimaging the RIO.
If you still need help and are going to another event this year, you should find your local CSAs and ask them to help you debug this problem. They’re there to help you with problems exactly like this, and they can help more efficiently in person than anyone can over the internet.
EDIT: Using the DCHP server shouldn’t take 2 minutes to assign the DS an IP (and if it does, you have a bigger problem). I would stick with dynamic IPs, as it makes everything easier settings-wise and you’re less likely to mess something up and get bypassed.
For the FMS you are correct, you use a /8
But for tethering, your supposed to use a /24 for whatever reason.
I’m not sure where you’re getting that information. /8 works just fine for Ethernet tethering. You might not want to do it in your shop if your school wifi uses some other 10.x.x.x network, but if you’re not connected to any other network, just use /8.
Using DHCP is at most a matter of seconds to set the IP address, but convincing some Windows systems to actually contact the DHCP server can take a very long time. Often a command-line IPCONFIG /RENEW will make it happen immediately, but if the system is unexpectedly content with a self-assigned address, even that doesn’t work reliably.
Static addresses work fine, and they’re the preferred fast fix when a laptop doesn’t quickly get a good address assigned when connecting to the field.