[Kevin Sevcik]

When your wheels started randomly running, did you have the Driver's Station connected? Was it Enabled? Was it in Autonomous mode?

If the DS wasn't connected or enabled, this shouldn't have happened, and NI, WPI, and FIRST would probably all like to know exactly what you were doing to make it occur.

If the DS was in autonomous mode, the OTB firmware has an autonomous mode that runs the motors for 2 seconds. This might have been what you noticed.

If the robot was in Teleop, you might have run across one of the bugs with the USB ports. First, the kit joysticks center themselves when the DS boots. So if you're leaning on the joysticks when you power up the DS, they'll be horribly off-center. So your motors could start up on their own.

A different issue is if you unplug the joysticks. They'll continue transmitting the old value even though they're unplugged. As far as I can tell, the only cure is to reboot the DS.

Finally, in what's probably a related issue, the joysticks sometimes transmit bad values after the DS starts up, until they're moved. The solution here is to jiggle the joysticks.

So your start up sequence should be:
1. Put Disable DS with dongle switch or by removing dongle.
2. Plug in all joysticks, and don't touch them until step 4.
3. Power up the Driver's Station.
4. When DS is finished starting up, jiggle the joysticks.
5. Enable robot and go to work.

The people responsible for the Driver's Station are apparently looking into the bad values from the joysticks on boot and when unplugged, but there hasn't been word on progress.