FMS Differences with motor safety?

[JefferMC]

I think the output of the motor safety warnings is a symptom, not the problem. It is my belief that the WPIlib has some issues, I'm thinking in the NetworkTables implementation, where it will stall a thread, keeping it from being able to update the motor controls.

In our "lab" using a practice robot, I would notice that at times the robot would become unresponsive. A few seconds later, the motor safety helper message would start on the console. I could close the SmartDashboard application, an error would appear on NetConsole and immediately the robot would recover and the messages would stop. Without SmartDashboard there was no such problem.

At our last regional (Knoxville), it was STRONGLY SUGGESTED that we install the latest version of the Driver Station software on our laptop. As soon as we did so, we started having control issues and motor safety helper warnings, even with no SmartDashboard application running.

By this time, I had put #if/#endif pairs around all of our SmartDashboard code, and we decided to disable them at the competition, but also to switch to another laptop still running the slightly older version of the Driver Station for competition as we were unable to get back on the practice field to test out the changes with the new version of the Driver Station.