I wish things were working. I have two classes of students trying to write simple code in RobotC and RobotC crashes so much that students are giving up before they have had a chance to make the rover move autonomously.
After setting up the preferences for VEX IQ and getting the license right students make a simple program in Graphical such as “MoveForward”. They download the firmware, save the program, compile the program and then when they click on download, RobotC goes into a slow motion freeze that it may recover from or it crashes with the two following error messages.
1.Failed to verify that the serial link is connected to a Robot Controller.
2.RobotC firmware is not installed or corrupted. It needs to be downloaded.
Link to screenshot of RobotC with crash messages is attached.
When this happens we have to unplug the battery and start over. Sometimes it works just fine, other times it crashes again.We have also tried switching USB ports, sometimes it works sometimes it does not.
I had one of our district’s tech guys in my class watching students work with the rovers and then after class we did some trial and error testing. It happen to me as an admin log in and to students as a student log in so it is not a district added glitch.It seems to be RobotC that crashes when downloading.
We have the current VEX Firmware:.Brain Version 1.12
As it is right now, RobotC is not worth using as a teaching tool. We will have to just build and drive the rovers as if they are glorified RC cars
I’m sorry about the trouble you’re experiencing. We have recently found an issue with the the latest 1.12 firmware and ROBOTC that seems to be causing issues when downloading - however these issues usually come up as “Failed to Play Slot” errors after successfully downloading a program. We’re hoping to have a fix out within the week to address some of these issues as soon as possible.
It doesn’t seem to look like ROBOTC is “crashing”, but rather is losing communication to the VEX IQ hardware for some reason (or not getting back a favorable response). If possible, can you capture a few message log traces for me to allow me to further diagnose the issue that’s occurring?
To enable message tracing, do the following:
Window Menu -> Menu Level -> Super User
View Menu -> Preferences -> Advanced Features Tab -> Internal Sub-Tab -> Message Tracing Dropdown -> Character Level
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/Vv5NgBd.png
Whenever you do anything like compiling/downloading, it’ll give a character level debug log of all communications between PC and VEX IQ (and works for Cortex too). You can just copy and paste this log into a text file and send it along so I can parse out and see what might be causing the issue. If you happen to have a successful compile/download session, close the debugger, right click on the message log and select “Clear Message Log” - otherwise it may grow to 100s of pages and be difficult to identify the issue quickly.
Once you captured the message logs, please send them directly to my primary e-mail address at tfriez (at) robotc [dot] net - and I’ll be able to investigate them.
Thanks in advance and I apologize about the issues again. We’ll get things sorted out as fast as we can!
