Communication lost between classmate and wireless bridge

[TheNASALady]

For some reason our cRio has lost communication with the wireless bridge.  We had no problems except an occasional watchdog error

but now there is nothing.  We get the green robot light but keep receiving error messages to check the power cable on the bridge and

the radio is not sending a signal.  Everything is wired correctly and this is stumping the heck out of me. I've looked into all of the suggestions

including disabling the firewall but we have no enabled firewall on the classmate.  My laptop picks up the wireless signal so I know the

bridge is working.

Anybody have any suggestions on what troubleshooting I can do to solve this problem.  I am wondering if somehow the code on the

cRio may have gotten corrupted.  Our programmer is no longer on the team and the code he's written for the season is on his

laptop.  Before I deploy any new code I want to be sure that may be the problem so I don't overwrite what's already there. 

Thanks for any help!

[Kevin_F]

Hey,

I would try to connect the cRIO directly to the bridge instead of using wireless. In addition to that I would see if you can open up the web configuration for the bridge when you are directly connected to it - you can get to this just by entering the IP address of the bridge into a browser.

I think its unlikely the code on the cRIO got corrupted. I think its more likely some network settings got changed on the bridge or on the classmate that is causing connection issues. That being said you definitely will want to have a development copy of your code since you will want to have the ability to redeploy code to the cRIO if necessary.

[TheNASALady]

Thanks for the suggestion Kevin.  So here is where I am.  Another team member called our programmer who is no longer on the team and he came by to troubleshoot.

We had the cRio wired to benchtop test setup.  He turned the classmate on and voila!  Communication.  Since then, even tethered with the crossover cable

there is no commuication.  I checked the IP address of the classmate and it was at the team default of .5 and the subnet mask was only 255.000.000.0.  I reset

everything to .6 and 255.255.255.0 and when I switch over to the driver station and go back to developer the IP address defaults back. I have no idea why this is

happening. I haven't checked the configuration of the bridge but that was my next step.  Andrew suggested to make sure the switch on the bridge was in the right setting and it is.

I have another cRio for a different team and that one is working fine. I suspect it is a setting with either the classmate or the bridge itself.  I'm hopeful to get the problem resolved

before the end of this week and definitely before we go to competition in the next three weeks.

[Kevin_F]

Definitely verify the bridge settings. When you say that it works with a different cRIO does that mean you used your classmate with a different cRIO? Did it use the same bridge as the one you are having trouble with? Seems like something weird is going on with the classmates IP settings.

[TheNASALady]

The classmate that gets communication is one for another team and it is being used with the bridge for that team.  I am really beginning to think that there has been some changing of the settings either on the classmate or the bridge.  I was able to reset the bridge today and was in the process of reconfiguring it when it totally lost communication with my laptop even wired directly to it.  I'm working on finding the problem and in one way this is good for the student who is replacing our programmer as it's making him learn new things. I'm working on the bridge by itself now at home to get the settings redone and saved.  Hopefully this time it will communicate with the cRio.

Thanks for helping me through this and keeping my mind somewhat sane.

[Kevin_F]

If you continue to have issues I would recommend branching out to use different hardware- different computer in place of the classmate and another bridge if possible so see if you can isolate where the issue is.