Autonomous/Teleop/Robot Main call errors

[beth_hadley]

We are curious (and nervous) about Labview code working properly at competitions. We observed several teams during Weak 1 competitions having issues with getting their Labview code to function correctly during matches. Several robots would start for a half second or so in autonomous, then stop for no apparent reason. Sometimes it would appear that connections had been lost, and other times the cRIO would reboot. Our team experienced a similar error while testing at home (we haven’t yet competed). We observed that this problematic autonomous behavior only occurs the first time autonomous is called. When we called autonomous subsequent times (by clicking the Autonomous button on the driver station), the autonomous operated fine.

We think the issue may have something to do with Robot Main (we haven’t altered the framework), although we welcome your suggestions. If your team experienced/is experiencing similar issues, please describe the situations that lead to the issue, and any fix you have found.

Thanks! Your help is appreciated.

[Greg McKaskle]

I was at a week one regional, and we saw a number of issues with various languages. If the robot is occasionally having its I/O shutdown, there should be messages on the Diagnostics tab detailing what deadlines are not being met. It is most likely due to waits or large amounts of processing taking place in the telelop function or in the autonomous loop. If output updates don't happen often enough, the watchdog or safety VIs will shutdown the outputs. If you see this symptom and can't locate the issue, post your code.

I saw crashes with Java and C++, but they were pretty easy to track down using the DS practice matches and sometimes forcing the cRIO to boot first and then plugging in the DS. This helped track down dependencies between auto and tele and race conditions in the init code. We didn't see a LV crash, but heard of a team experiencing this at a different regional. We are hoping to get code to reproduce this, but haven't had a chance yet.

Greg McKaskle