I finally started programming. I made my program, hooked up all the motors, hooked up the joystick to my computer, and it didn’t work. I tried downloading my program to the cortex through vexnet (via controller) and it said that the firmware for the controller was out of date; so I tried to download firmware to the controller but it said that there wasn’t a controller attached! After this I unhooked tho joystick and turned it off but when I turned it back on all of the lights flashed once then after a second or two the robot light starts flashing green once every second or two. I also tried to use our other controller but the exact same thing happened. 
Is it something wrong with RobotC, the controllers maybe, or is it something really simple?
Is this a new cortex or controller? If so you would need to pair them.
They have been paired
This might help.
Close RobotC
Connect your controller to your computer with the USB cable.
Open RobotC
Go to Robot > Download Firmware > Manually Download Firmware > VEXnet Joystick Firmware
Wait
Disconnect Joystick
Connect your Cortex to Computer with the USB cable
Go to Robot > Download Firmware > Manually Download Firmware >RobotC Firmware
Wait
Turn off the Cortex and disconnect Cortex from Computer.
Connect battery to Cortex and turn on the Cortex
Wait
Turn off Cortex
Connect Cortex to computer with USB Cable, download program
Turn off Cortex
Disconnect Cortex from computer
Pair Controller and Cortex
I hope this works.
That’s just it, when I try to turn on the joystick the robot (as in the robot light on the joystick) light simply blinks green and when I try to update its firmware it says that there isn’t a device hooked up to the computer.
Do you have a second joystick to see if it is joystick or cortex that is the trouble? Or maybe the computer?
Are you running robot C as admin? Do you have local admin privileges?
Yeah the second joystick did the same thing. I don’t know how I would check to see if it’s the computer or not and yes I am running it as an administrator.
Use the “software inspection” functionality (robot menu->advanced->software inspection and post the results, if there are any, here.
I am having the exact same problem. Anything work yet?
Carnegie Mellon has a awesome on-line tutorial that addressed many of the issues you are having. Here is a link
I finally got to practice after a couple weeks off and for whatever reason the joystick worked fine. I think it was because windows 10 got corrupted because I started noticing problems like this robotC problem and autodesk problems and I decided to uninstall and reinstall Windows 10 and now EVERYTHING works fine. If you’re still having the same problem I would suggest that you wipe your operating system and reinstall it because that fixed all of my problems. Anyway, hope you figure it out soon.