Using the dashboard duiring the competitions?

[SCidkelly]

Could someone tell us how to connect to the drivers station to use the dashboard during competition.  Pre-ship we would connect wirelessly or hard connect to the wireless router.  But were were not able to connect to the game router on the robot wirelessly during the competition and we were not able to power our wireless routers on the field.

[sciencewhiz]

You connect through the other ethernet port on the drivers station.

[Philbot]

Seriously, you should have known that you were not going to be able to use your wireless at the event.

Everyone's been told that all non-playing-field activity HAS to be hard wired, so the only reason you should have even taken your wireless router is to use it as a dumb wired hub.

Just having it on in your pits may have caused trouble with your own on-field communications.

What if your robot had tried connecting to the one in your pits instead of the Field station?

Anyway....

The standard "Pit" configuration should be:

Cable from the PC to the Driver Station,

Cable from the Driver Station to the cRIO port 1

As the other poster said... you should always connect your PC/laptop into your Driver Station, using either ethernet port.

When doing so, make sure that your Laptop's hard wired ethernet adapter is setup with your team's fixed IP  10.xx.yy.6

That's another reason for not trying to connect wirelessly, you probably can't setup both the wired, and wirless connection to have the same IP address, so you need to pick one or the other.

During our event, we attached a 10' length of ethernet cable to the Driver Console, and added a velcro strap to keep it wrapped up when not in use.

We used this cable to attach the driver station to the robot for pit testing.

We then just ran a second cable from the PC to the Driver station for downloads and code debugging.

Phil.

[SCidkelly]

Thanks Phil.  Just for the record we knew we wouldn't be able to use the wireless router to the competition. 

Despite sending FIRST our $10,000 in October for 2 regionals, FIRST couldn't figure out how to send our requested control system 18 mile up the road so we could have it in the pre-season. There was not much extra time to play around with the dashboard during the build season. After we went to the Suffield Shakedown pre-season and had the FIRST field officials have everyone reset their WPA - 3 times in order to get the field to work and we still sat on the field for over an hour and a half waiting for communications, there was not much extra time to play around with the dashboard. After Suffield, we spent the rest of the pre-ship time re-establishing communications with our robot. There was not much extra time to play around with the dashboard. At the Granite State Regional we spent so much time trying to trouble shoot the new field control system - our team re-played 9 matches and worked with the field crew through lunch to help with the trouble shooting, there was not much extra time to play around with the dashboard. I was just asking the community for some help - not looking for a reprimand!

Now on to a follow-up to my original question, we tried connecting the dashboard through the second port on the driver’s station with a straight CAT 5 cable and it did not work.  Will it work with a crossover cable?  We never had a chance to try. 

I have refrained from saying it, because we all knew it would be a steep learning curve and a lot of bugs to work out with the new control system, but this is too much. I wish we had the support system we had with IFI.  I never had a nasty reply to a question from them!

.

[Philbot]

Sorry if my reply sounded like a "rempriand", but ....I meant it more as a warning to anyone else trying to do a similar thing.

If you are having trouble you need to go back to the basics.

For the record I'm not from NI or FIRST or anyone other than someone trying to help.

Hopefully you did see that I offered several suggestions for getting up and running.

I am at an advantage as a beta team mentor, which is why I was trying to provide input and steer you (a bit too forceably I guess) away form using wireless.

I have seen almost all of the isseus your are encountering (except we never used WAP) and have done my best to help people avoid them.

If you are having trouble using the dashbard, going "cabled" to the PC should be your first instinct.

Most of the issues I've seen with cRIO updates and dashboard has been due to conflict issues with the laptop's wi-fi. (causing IP problems)

It's no fault of the control system, it's just too many networks for the software to correctly address.

All of the basic installation documentation, and network configuration diagrams show the pc/dashboard wired to the Driver stations, so please don't blame "poor support".

The Driver Station, Gaming adapter, and Wireless router ethernet ports are auto-sensing, so the type of cable used will not be an issue.

Only the Camera needs a crossover cable.

More than likely are issues with IP assignments (as I tried to explain in my prior post), either on your PC or elsewhere in your network setup.

Once again, if you want a foolproof setup to figure out your problem, go cabled.  Once that's working drop back to wireless.

Note:  Just because your laptop candownload code to the robot does not mean that the IP is configured correctly for the dashboard.  It requires exactly the correct IP address.

So I repeat....  turn off your Wi-FI and ensure that your hard wired connection has your required IP address.  10.xx.yy.6

I have found that almost 90% of dashboard issues are from this problem alone.

One way to verify this is to download the Pinger utility I published on Cheip Delphi:  http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2177

Or use the 'FRC Diagnostic Utility" published elswhere.

Both will allert you to any real network problems.