Team 1718 2011 Beta - Changes Thus Far

[Pi Fighter]

*DISCLAIMER*
The information listed here is what is being observed in the beta test by Team 1718. As such, none of this is official and all of this is subject to change.

Beta testing for the 2011 FRC controls systems in underway, and Team 1718 is currently beta testing the 2011 LabVIEW programming suite. The two major changes thus far from last year to this year are the new safety VI’s, and the death of Autonomous Iterative.

•Safety VI’s are the new watchdogs. Now, you only need to configure the safety updates in your Begin, and update them in TeleOp and Autonomous before the value reaches its target. NI created these as a simpler alternative to the watchdog commands. NI kept the watchdog commands for teams that want to continue using them.

•Autonomous Iterative is no longer a VI. Now, Autonomous Independent is the only autonomous file in the robot project. NI got rid of Iterative so there would be no confusion on the differences, and how to differentiate between the two in Begin.vi. If you want to use Autonomous Iterative (Or rather the closest thing to it), a While Loop in your autonomous is effectively the same thing.

We will continue to add new information to this thread as testing continues.

-Team 1718

[kramarczyk]

Do you guys have any days selected when you might do a demo? I'm not asking about content, just which box on the calendar to reserve.

[kamocat]

Thanks for posting this! I see you also posted at forums.usfirst.org

[lon.bushweiler]

Both of these items sound like helpful additions (or subtractions).

Thanks for posting the information.

[keehun]

Disk #2 came earlier this week and Wind River so far is just a bunch of command line tools. I haven't used it much yet, however...

[dotbran]

What are the specific differences between the Safety and Watchdog VIs? DO the Safety VIs function similarly to Watchdog's "Feed" VI?

[Greg McKaskle]

The safety updates are built into the Set Speed. This way, when something isn't updated, the display will tell you which motor wasn't updated in time and was shutdown.

By default, these are on for the Robot Drive, and can be turned on with a parameter for other motors. Spinners don't need to be updated, so you may want to leave it off. An arm is something you should update often, so it would be wise to turn it on.

Greg McKaskle

[kamocat]

What display are you referring to?
Are there plans to have these "disabled" statuses display on the dashboard?

[Greg McKaskle]

The display that I should have defined is the error message display. The robot code will receive the errors. The default framework sends the errors to the DS. The DS displays them on the Diagnostics tab. I believe the DS sends the errors to the dashboard, but the default DB doesn't do anything with them.

Greg McKaskle