RoboRIO Exhibiting Weird behavior on field

[mrcookiejars]

Hello!

During an offseason this weekend a RoboRIO had sporadic connection issues.

FTA said they disconnected from the field but it the COM light was green still, seeming to indicate it had somehow been activated into safe mode. We tried seeing if maybe the RoboRIO was receiving dirty power but the electrical logs seemed fine and 2 CSAs checked the cabling which also seemed fine.

RoboRIO would also sometimes refused to connect to the DS when tethered both via Ethernet or USB and sometimes required several reboots.

CSA attempted to flash radio firmware, reconfigure with WPA kiosk, and swapped out for spare radio with also same results.

The connection issues continued for about 6-7 matches. Sometimes the FTA would have to time the roboRIO connecting and disconnecting to start the match.

We were thinking maybe something in the code was wonky but couldn't find anything. They loaned a roboRIO from another team and were fine for 2 matches after that. They did disconnect at the end of the 3rd match after the swap but we figured that was an unrelated crash caused robot code (which is weird cause they never crashed on the practice field which they went to pretty often).

The students also opened the grey plastic casing and didn't find anything. When they shake the circuit board itself though they could hear something like it was a maraca. Which I assume isn't normal.

[BoKnows]

The COM light shouldn't indicate safe mode.  I'd expect it to be off in safe mode.  It only gets lit by code running when the roboRIO starts up normally.  We'd see a specific flashing pattern on the STATUS LED for safe mode.

When connected to the USB, did we every try changing the "team number" to 172.22.11.2 in the driver station?  I'm essentially looking to see if the problem was beyond the driver station laptop.  It's possible the mDNS on the laptop wasn't playing nice.  If we use the specific IP instead of the team number, we could rule this out.

With the second roboRIO providing what seems like better behavior, it's likely something on the roboRIO.  Though, it seems strange it'd simultaneously impact both the USB and Ethernet ports.  I don't see any mention of trying to re-image the roboRIO in this.  Did we try those steps with no success?  That's the best way to get the software side of the connection into a known state.

[mrcookiejars]

Hello! Great to hear from you.

I might have misspoken or misheard which light was on. I wasn't on the field at the time so I didn't see it myself.

If I'm being honest this was back in November so I don't remember too clearly what we tried.

The team had 2 laptops but I don't remember if we tried swapping them out.

I think we reimaged it was version one below the latest at the time. We were trying to download FRC Game Tools to get the newer version but it was a 3GB file and the scoring table's Internet wasn't the greatest.

Is this something NI would RMA or look at just to be safe. Even if we don't quite know what the issue is?

[BoKnows]

It's fair to not have the best memory.  I don't have the greatest memory from last week.

It's something NI could potentially do a RMA for.  Though, I wouldn't promise it would be diagnosed on this side. 

It sounds like you're in contact with the team but not with the team.  Are you able to facilitate a connection?  If so, send me a message here with an email and I'll respond so we can all get into a thread together.