[Wayne TenBrink]

I'm not the programmer, and neither is the original poster, so please bear with our ignorance. Our programming mentor has about 2 months worth of experience with LabView.

When you all describe "feeding the watchdog", what actually does that? From your description, I assume that its some built-in, behind the scenes, function of the code that just happens without any special "instruction" from our programmer. And if the code is too busy or gets stuck in a "while" loop, it doesn't feed the watchdog.

What would make that happen only intermittently? It seemed to happen to us at one particular setup location. It isn't camera related, because we don't use it. We use 4 CIM's/4 Jaguars, a gyro, two limity switches, and 3 microswitches for setting autonomous patterns. Two of the match failures occurred at the start of the match, resulting in no autonomous motion, and nothing after it either (until we learned how to reset the cRio from the DS (thanks 494)). One of our failures occurred after a successful autonomous. I don't know for sure if we got the "watchdog" message that time, but one side of the drive train (Jaguar/CIM) didn't work after autonomous. After the match, we found no problems and the problem didn't repeat.

We would like to think it was field/system related, but we really don't know. If its a robot problem (short, programming issue, loose connection, improper connection, etc.) we would really like to know. Intermittent, random, stuff is scary and frustrating and we would like to do whatever we can to fix it (if is something under our own control).

Is there a credible scenario where static electricity could be involved? Doesn't seem like it to me since it happened at the start of the match. What about startup sequencing? I've read where some teams had communication problems when they powered up the robot before the DS. We generally powered up the DS first, but probably not always. I wouldn't think that would necessarily have anything to do with watchdog.

We generally like the new control system and LabView, but are anxious to find out where the bugs are hiding out and get rid of them.

Thanks for all your help so far in this thread.