NI 9870/9871 NI -Serial Scan Engine Support : COM ports disappear

[Corey.Rotunno]

I have an issue I am hoping someone might have a solution/work around for.

I have a cRIO-9048 with two serial modules (NI9870 and NI9871). The chassis is operating in "hybrid mode". If I load my FGPA bitfile onto the FPGA, then do a fresh software install on the chassis, everything works great. All COM ports are there as expected. However, sometimes when I restart/reboot the chassis the COM ports disappear. The only way I have been able to get them to "come back" is to reformat the chassis and start over. I found another thread related to this issue, saying it was a known bug that was fixed in 2023Q2. I got pretty excited about this as when I first encountered the issue I was running with the RT2021 base image. Once I moved to newer base image, it worked for a little while but now I'm back in the same spot.

If this was just a lab toy this wouldn't be such a big issue. However, this project is going to replicated and be deployed offsite. I do not want calls to reimage a chassis every time someone reboots a test station for whatever reason.

I am hoping if there is not a true fix for this, that someone might have a good work around like being able to reload the drivers with the chassis running, or something like that.

Thanks,
Corey