Joysticks Laggy/Jerky

[CoachPoore]

Originally Posted by Ken Streeter

We (1519) were having this problem starting a couple weeks ago when we upgraded our Driver Station (the Classmate) to the new 2011 release running Windows 7. (We had not been having the problem with Windows XP on the classmate.)

This week, we switched to using a different laptop (a Dell Latitude D610) and the lag problem has gone away completely. We believe our problem was due to the Classmate, rather than the robot!

Yes, we were also seeing other concerning symptoms such as the robot continuing to operate for up to about 5s after it should have been disabled via the driver station. This was observed when disabling by pressing the space bar or clicking on the "Disable" button. The Classmate in question had been re-imaged to Windows 7 using the (unmodified) memory stick provided in the KoP. Other than activating Windows 7, the only other thing we had done to the Classmate was to install the latest driver station update.

[Mark McLeod]

When I've seen the slow down/stutter due to the Classmate it has been when there is very little free disk space left.
The OS starts struggling to keep up with it's regular housekeeping and commands to the robot begin to get delayed.

[TheBigCheese]

Well we've determined that it's actually two problems.

1. We're tripping a breaker if you jam hard in the opposite direction with inertia.
I'm not really sure why this is happening, since we've never had the problem in previous years. It's just a cim and toughbox chained to a wheel.

2. The Joysticks give some faulty readings.
The joysticks will read zero if properly moved. I can move it slowly to full and about 5-10% of the time the Y axis will read at zero, then quickly jump to the correct reading if I wiggle the stick a bit. It's strange because it happens on all models, and on certain sticks more than others. We're going to go ahead and install the proprietary drivers to see if that helps.


We've tried different laptops as well, though that doesn't seem to be the problem, nor does tethering help.

We also just switched to Victors and we're still tripping the breaker and having Joystick problems, so it's definitely not a problem with CAN.

Thanks for the ongoing help.