Serious bug identified in SmartDashboard/NetworkTables -- robot hangs

[Jared]

Originally Posted by Joe Ross

I think we've probably seen this. In the pits, we often have the driver station connected to the robot, with a LabVIEW dashboard using SmartDashboard/NetworkTables. When there is a programming change, the programmers plug in a second computer and run SmartDashboard. As we heavily use the preferences class and other uploaded files, we aren't often rebooting the robot. Sometimes when we disconnect the programming computer ethernet cable, we see a hang in NetworkTables on the driver station.

We use Java on the robot, but I assume the implementation is similar to C++.

I've had something similar happen at competition before. Very often, our team does a test of all the robot functions while it's on the cart before we put it on the field. One time, I disconnected the robot as it was sending our shooter rpm to the smartdashboard, and didn't restart the robot before the match. The robot connected, but no smartdashboard happened, and somehow, all the indicators and the auto mode chooser disappeared, which was a problem for choosing our auto mode.