Team 834 RoboRIO Status light issues and Imaging/Discovery Issues

[mdurrani808]

Hi NI,

My FRC team (Team 834) was trying to update our RoboRIO yesterday from the 2020 to the latest 2021 version. It kept giving us a corrupt firmware issue every time we tried. We realized we were trying to update it with the Imaging utility that still had the 2021.3.1 version on it so we reinstalled all of our game tools but it still faced the same issue. Now, we can't even discover it via a USB connection and the official imaging software. We tried a different laptop, cable, USB port, new RoboRIO, changed out dongles, redowloaded tools once more, but no luck. We fear that it is bricked but even with a new RoboRIO (straight out of the box) it wouldn't be discovered. Also, we tried booting in safe mode and the status light wouldn't blink in groups of three it would just blink constantly. How do we fix this? If you need any more data/PNs please let me know.

[BoKnows]

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@mdurrani808 wrote:

We tried a different laptop, cable, USB port, new RoboRIO, changed out dongles, redowloaded tools once more, but no luck. We fear that it is bricked but even with a new RoboRIO (straight out of the box) it wouldn't be discovered.

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A couple of quick clarifying questions.  Does the second sentence here mean you're unable to communicate with two separate roboRIOs, including one that didn't have the 3.1 update?

What do the LEDs do when you power up?

[mdurrani808]

Hi, thanks for the quick response.

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@BoKnows wrote
Does the second sentence here mean you're unable to communicate with two separate roboRIOs, including one that didn't have the 3.1 update?

The first roboRIO was on our 2020 robot that we tried to image with the 3.1 update but kept getting the corrupt firmware error. The first roboRIO worked fine with the old image it had (latest 2020 one). Eventually, the roboRIO imaging software couldn't even detect it. The second roboRIO was completely new with 0 updates on it and wouldn't even get detected when the robot was on and the PC was plugged into the Rio. We were unable to communicate with both but both of them boot.

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What do the LEDs do when you power up?

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I was last in the shop yesterday, but from what I remember they didn't light up when the robot was on. After I tried to put it in safe mode, it started flashing very rapidly with no noticeable blocks (ex. it wasn't flashing in groups of 3 just constant).

[BoKnows]

It sounds like a pair of problems.

The continuous flash when going into safe mode generally means the safe mode is corrupt.  I'll send you either a PM or an email with instructions on how to fix that.  (If you can get PMs, I'll go that route.)

After we fix that, we'll want to take a look at the connection issue.  The lack of detection is more typically a network issue of some type.  That's not to say the two issues cannot be linked.  I just want to set the expectation we may have more work after we get the first fix in place.  LEDs being off is normal (assuming they light up briefly during boot) for a roboRIO that either isn't imaged or isn't connected to the driver station.

[4829_Programming_Team]

Can you also email us the link?

Thanks,

4829 Programming Team

[mshafer]

Please post a new thread so what debugging steps have been tried is easy to tell.