Watchdog replaced with MotorSafety?

[Bethie42]

We're having watchdog errors. We thought we'd isolated the problem to the camera, then to the driver station switches, then to the third joystick [heh], but we're still having issues. Using WindRiver.

1) We want to disable all User watchdogs, in order to see if we still get watchdog errors (ie, System watchdog/communications problem).
To this end, in the constructor we used GetWatchdog().SetEnabled(false).

Does anyone have experience with/opinions on troubleshooting System watchdog errors?

2) Then we learned about the MotorSafety class, which apparently replaces the User watchdog this year. This was hidden away in the documentation at FIRST Forge and I haven't seen any threads on CD about it yet. Does anyone have any info about MotorSafety, MotorSafetyHelper, and how to work with or disable them? I really wish the documentation had more updated info about working with watchdogs for the 2011 season.

We used robotDrive->SetSafetyEnabled(false) to disable the MotorSafety on the drive motors: to be safe, we even disabled the MotorSafety on our manipulator Jaguar, which supposedly is automatically disabled anyway.

Can anyone help us to disable all watchdogs? I can post/PM our code if you like.


3) We suspect the router. We're pretty sure our watchdog issues started after we replaced the old bridge on last year's bot [which we're prototyping everything on] with the DAP router. We don't seem to have watchdog errors while running tethered [we're going to test that more tomorrow]. Has anyone encountered watchdog/communication errors with the new router?

Also, we have a Jaguar mounted RIGHT next to the router: does anybody have experience with motors causing interference? Our issues also seemed to start right around the time we began using that Jag, but it's just a hunch.


Thank you so much for any help you can give!! We really really appreciate it