I think I killed my classmate

[richardharman]

Ok.  First of all, this is the first year I have ever tried programming anything more elaborate than a TI-83.  In prior years I relied on others to do the programming but have been intrigued by labview and its potential (for disaster as well as good).  Plus all my former programmers are sick of robots.   So I am trying to get labview running and not having much luck.

I decided to spend the first week reading the manual and posts to ni in order to find out what common problems were and then start configuring everything this week.  well it was a good idea until.....

•  I configured the classmate so that it has our team number and everything

•  I downloaded the updates for the driver station and for labview.  I think I installed them correctly.

•  I imaged the cRIO according to the directions

•  at this point on the driver station the green lights were on for both the stop button and "communication" but the green light was not on for "program"

•  for two days I looked for the short orange "crossover cable" that is shown in the FRC manual chapter 2 (it is not in the kit of parts) and then made the fateful mistake of assuming that the 2 ft long gray cable that came with the kit of parts is what is used to deploy the robot code.  its not

Its not the same thing as a "crossover cable"

•  Starting on page 38 of section 2 of the 2010 control manual I tried to load the basic labview default code, unfortunately with the gray, non-crossover cable.

•  Now the class mate does not fully load the drivers station and what does load does not respond.  The green communication and stop button lights are no longer on.  I am unable to get out of this drivers station and into the development side at all.

I get the error message

" Missing sub VI Write to FRC.IO.vi in VI Writecustomio.vi

I put the back up classmate flashdrive into the classmate but cannot really figure out what to do with it  (better  damage control)

I am going to call ni and bug them until they are sick of me so help if you can.

Thanks

[George_P_Burdell]

Richard called in for support.  We worked through most of his issues.  Consider his classmate not dead, but sleeping!

-Mike S

[NI-Bob]

Hello Richard,

One other thing to keep in mind, if you are stuck in a position where the Classmate does not appear to be working properly (or Windows is throwing errors etc). The USB Key that came in the kit is the Restoration Tool in order to reformat the Classmate and reinstall all the software on it.

Now, that does not mean you should use this tool at will.  Of course it is always good to give us a call and we can help you work through some of the issues.  However, if you are stuck, and for whatever reason cannot get a hold of us in time (over the weekend etc.), that is an option.

Just make sure to remember to install the mandatory updates again after restoring the Classmate!

Just thought I would share that tidbit of joy with you for future reference.  We are always happy to help 🙂

Thanks!
Bob H

NI FIRST Support

[richardharman]

Thanks to all the help from ni.  Most of the problems are resolved. 

•  It appears that you cannot build even the default program unless you register Labview (do not use evaluation version of the program)

•  Still the classmate will not go to the driver station properly.  This occurred after I mistakenly tried to enable the cRIO using the wrong cable.

•  ni  suggested that the reason this might be the case is because I had loaded the LABview update after loading the Driver Station update.  That does not appear to be the case and I may need to use the emergency back up on the flash drive.  If so, I will call ni this afternoon and have them walk me through the procedure.  I will then post the results here so other teams can see my results and compare them to their similar situations.

[richardharman]

IT'S ALIVE!!!!!!!!

And I suspect that many of the problems I needed to resolve are being experienced by other teams writing into this forum

Here is the moral of the story

•  Be sure to register LABview.  Do not use it in evaluation mode.  It was a somewhat tricky process.  You may need to call NI for help in doing this correctly.

•  Be sure that you are using a crossover cable and not a typical ethernet cable.  The pink cable in the kit of parts is the crossover cable.

•  You will have a problem with the driver station if you download  and install the labview update after you install the driver station opdate (this was my ultimate problem).  On the same NI page where you get the driver station update and the labview update there is a file that you must put in the classmate's windows file to correct this problem.  Once again this was not a simple matter of dragging and dropping.  It was an involved process that one of the tech folks here at school helped me with.

•  Be sure to follow the correct set of directions for enabling the default labview code.  Read them carefully before you try the first time.

•  It really helped both the ni tech support person and me that I had read the pertinent pages of the manual and had printing them out, organized them into a binder and clearly flagged those pages I knew I would need to access.  As you probably know by now, information you need is scattered over many documents and finding a page you need and read the previous day may be hard to find, particularly on a computer that you are scrolling through and also trying to fix a problem on.  Take a little extra time and get organized.  The ni support will be able to help you much more efficiently.

•  Get some sleep