Robot Lighting

[taichichuan]

We used an Arduino Mega with an Ethernet shield this year for the RPM on the shooter and the angle of our ball launch. Using the Ethernet wasn't too hard. But, the cRio had something odd in the robot code where if you started sending packets, but there was nothing actively reading them, that the robot would eventually go offline. We were using UDP on the local link as a directed unicast to keep packets from going across the link to the driver station.

It's definitely related to the robot code because I've been using VxWorks for over 25 years and I've never encountered anything like this failure in the main OS. Nonetheless, if you have a thread reading the packets all of the time, then everything works well. I'll be doing some tests as soon as I get access to a cRio again to see how much data the cRio can absorb via the Ethernet during normal operation before the driver station packets start getting dropped.