[Mike Mahar]

Be careful with this approach. We had problems last year. The data from the driver's station is sent during the disabled period and not during autonomous. We were reading the our autonomous mode from digital input pins on the driver's station and they were being sent to the robot properly. Just as the FMS was switching from disabled to autonomous, however, we would get one last packet that was full of garbage. This would set our autonomous mode to something random.

I don't know if this was an artifact for the old driver's station or something inherent in the comm system. If it's the comm system you will have to code around it.