THE HORROR! THE HORROR!

[thinker&planner]

May I say that we were one of those teams in Florida who was "spinning out", and that was not due to FMS. It was our vision code that kept spinning because it couldn't find a target (we are still having problems, but whatever). Unfortunately, this happened during autonomous and we had discs in the bot. The judges weren't very happy about our spinning, disc-shooting robot (but they were understanding later). We call this the "Death Spin".

On the other hand, we HAVE had some problems with communications. In our last two matches, we suddenly lost comm right after auto ended. we grabbed the controls, drove to the feeder,loaded discs, turned around, and died. The driver station said that we had comm and code, and yes, we do have the most recent version. In case you want more details; we program in Java and use the Smart Dashboard. Our robot worked for the whole day until our last two matches, and we can't remember changing our code majorly. Our robot works great while tethered with the ethernet cord. We had to reduce the resolution of our camera because the control system was delaying so much that we accidentally fell over.

Other teams seem to be having this problem and we have consulted with the control system experts who have told us this: Java has a 5-sec delay when it resets the gyro (andymark) which our whole drive system is based off of (orientation to the field). We moved the gyro zero function into the disabled code but haven's been able to test it yet. Our code might be crashing. We need to get to the arena early to test tomorrow.

If you have suggestions, that would be great, and I hope that we can resolve this issue soon (1st match tomorrow!).