FCS always sees Samantha as Exclusive

[norton]

Hi,

We are able to get as far as the FCS seeing our robot, but it is always listed as "Exclusive". We were working with other FTC teams and our robot worked with all of their systems, but when we tried to connect their robots to ours, theirs turned Exclusive as well. We've tried rebooting everything and reconfiguring everything, but it never goes away.

Is there a setting in the FCS that we're missing?

Thanx in advance.

The Ponytail Posse

[FTC Ringer]

I've seen this kind of issue happen when a robot is already currently connected to an FCS and you try to connect it to a different FCS. Is what you're describing more than one FCS running in the same area? Or are you talking about using different systems in completely different locations?

[norton]

When we were working with other teams (not at our team headquarters), we had different FCSs on different computers, but only one FCS running at a time.

At our team headquarters, we only have one laptop with one FCS, but the Samantha module still reports that it is Exclusive.

[FTC Ringer]

I believe what that means is the Samantha module for some reason believes that it is exclusively connected to something else. If you select it anyway and try to connect to it, you should be given the option to force the connection anyway. After doing that, your Samantha should connect to your FCS.

[FTC5972]

We had a very similar problem with the "Exclusive" connection during our first season and a veteran team helped troubleshoot the problem for us. We have our FCS software loaded onto a laptop that had the wireless signal enabled. The laptop's wireless signal "connected" to the Samantha module and established the exclusive connection before the router's wireless signal could connect. All we had to do was disable the wireless signal from the laptop and only use the wireless signal from the router and have not had any problems since then. Not sure if you have the same situation, but hopefully the information is helpful!

[norton]

I believe what that means is the Samantha module for some reason believes that it is exclusively connected to something else. If you select it anyway and try to connect to it, you should be given the option to force the connection anyway. After doing that, your Samantha should connect to your FCS.

When we click the "Connect" button after the robot is selected, nothing happens. We don't get an option to force the connection. Do you get a dialog box?

[norton]

We had a very similar problem with the "Exclusive" connection during our first season and a veteran team helped troubleshoot the problem for us. We have our FCS software loaded onto a laptop that had the wireless signal enabled. The laptop's wireless signal "connected" to the Samantha module and established the exclusive connection before the router's wireless signal could connect. All we had to do was disable the wireless signal from the laptop and only use the wireless signal from the router and have not had any problems since then. Not sure if you have the same situation, but hopefully the information is helpful!

We made sure that the wireless adapter was disabled from the network control panel and that didn't help. I know other laptops have a hardware switch, but this model doesn't. Do you think the software Disable isn't enough?

We did get the FCS connected to the robot using a different PC. In fact, it was a Surface that was connected to the router wirelessly because it didn't have an ethernet port. We were able to control the robot via game controller and everything.

We'll have to do further investigation into the processes running on the particular problem laptop and see if we can determine what the Samantha module is locking on to.