[Radical Pi]

In my experience, often when people blame the FMS for their problems, they really should be looking at the overall setup of the robot on the field. By simply running it in the pits and saying "it works fine, must be a problem with the field", a whole host of diagnosable issues are being ignored. For instance, by default any robot using RobotBuilder will have their main loop directly tied to the packets coming from the Driver Station. When the robot is operating over wireless, there's many more dropped packets, and each dropped packet is one loop of the robot code that doesn't run. An overly strict watchdog could easily cause problems there.

Case in point, last year at champs we had an issue where auton would work fine in the pits, but on field it would just sit there. It had worked at our previous regional, and under FMS lite we couldn't replicate the problem. Nobody could figure out what was up, and as much as I would have loved to blame the Newton field, the issue turned out to be a seemingly unrelated change to the code which canceled the autonomous command if the Driver Station wasn't connected when the cRIO booted. Since the DS was always tethered in the pits, but on the field it had to wait for the radio to finish connecting, the problem only showed in the pits if we knew what to look for.