[TedP]

Originally Posted by Phil_Lutz

If I'm hearing you right, what you are saying is I can have these switches on my OI (say port3) and read them in Disabled mode and act on then when not disabled.

You ARE hearing me right. It's important that you need to SAVE the state before going into autonomous mode. Autonomous mode DOES NOT MAINTAIN the state of the OI inputs. It clears them. That's why it's important to save.

There's a working example here:

http://www.osufirst.org/twiki/bin/vi...04RegionalCode

More specifically, in main.c, when **NOT** in autonomous mode:

int autonomous_on = 1;

void main()
{
...
autonomous_on = ( winchPneuSwitch == 1 ) ? 0 : autonomous_on;
}

That is, in the main.c the autonomous_on is set to 1 as a default. winchPneuSwitch is set to 0 while in autonomous mode -- Getdata() does that.

So our main.c just sits and churns while disabled and waits for winchPneuSwitch to get set to 1. If it gets set to 1 even for an instant, it LATCHES that data in. The autonomous code can then basically say:

if( autonomous_on )
{
do autonomous code
}
else
{
do something else (just sit?)
}

Additionally, we never were planning on doing anything in autonomous until competition. So we never had any switches anywhere. We show in this example we use a switch designed for a "winch pneumatic" to set our autonomous mode bit. We don't even need special hardware on the OI to set this -- we can just use switches already have.

Additionally, we don't enable immediately after autonomous mode -- we wait for the user to hit a button. So it's okay to leave these switches in a bad state because the driver can set them back before "enabling" the robot.

I hope that helps.