CPU spike to 100% - robot unresponsive

[Jared Russell]

I have helped teams debug this problem at events many times over the years, and the majority of the time the issue is a "for" or "while" loop where there shouldn't be one. With an Iterative or Command-based robot, you seldom need loops in user code.

Other less common causes are interrupts or TimerTasks that take too long to run and miss their deadlines, very long print statements, and deadlocks.

I would put the robot up on blocks and try to reproduce the failure.

One strategy that is quick-and-dirty that I use on desktop apps is to run the program in a debugger, then pause execution and look at the current line once I hit 100% CPU usage. If your CPU utilization is normally fairly low, this method has good odds of stopping in the problematic section. Consider it CPU profiler roulette