Lag Issues On Field

[gerberduffy]

We've had field communication issues for a number of years now. We found that the root of the problem most of the time is spawning too many threads that ate up processor time, or logging output to stdout/files, which kills flash memory and halts the FPGA (cRIO).

In the old version of our software, every robot sensor/component spawned its own thread, and we suffered often from serious comm issues, even at home. To solve this, we put all sensor polls into a single main-event thread that polls ALL sensors a few times a second, and that knocked out nearly all of our problems.

It's odd that you never had problems at home, do you have any custom hardware, or manually set the IP's of something? You could have an IP collision with another device that the FMS is looking for.