Motor Control issues

[Jack Gillespie]

We have gone through the tutorials, code deployed, Camera is working, joysticks working on the Dashboard, Motors don't run. Get the following error message: 44061 Occurred at "left and right motors in the VI path: Robot Main.VI. We are trying to run the sample arcade program given in Labview.

[Greg McKaskle]

Have you enabled the DS? What do the motor controller LEDs look like?

Greg McKaskle

[Jack Gillespie]

The Driver Station is Enabled. The Talon LED's are on solid and not blinking

[Greg McKaskle]

Those are good signs.

When you press the joystick forward, does the LED on the motor controller start to blink? Does the blink rate correspond to the power being requested? If not, I'd check the code to see what value is being sent to the motor controller. It should be between -1 and 1 inclusive. Also, how often is it being sent? If it is sent and the code then spends a long time doing something else, the RobotDrive Safety mechanism will set the motors back to 0 after 100ms. From your description, it sounds like the first issue.

One other thing to check is that the PWM cables look "right", black on the outside of the roboRIO and built correctly with the same colors in the same position on both ends.

Greg McKaskle

[Jack Gillespie]

I will check this morning on the roboRio side for the PWM cables, but I believe they are correct. I know they are correct on the Talon side. I will also check continuity of the PWM's. When we move the joysticks movement shows in the Driver Station. No change of any kind on the talons As soon as I get to school I will upload a photo of the code.

Thanks for all of your time

[Jack Gillespie]

We have checked the PWM cables both for polarity and contitnuity.
We have checked the PWM settings in the code We are using the default code in Labview

[ozrien]

If the Talon Sr LEDs are solid orange, then they are being commanded to go to neutral. That suggests either the joystick is in the wrong slot (remember they start at zero this year, not one) or some other logic issue in the robot code.

Try to just create a simple app that drives the Talon. That should help narrow down the problem. If it works then work out the differences. If it does not work try focus on that.

[Alan Anderson]

Have you made any changes to the default program?

How are you running the code on the robot?

[Greg McKaskle]

If you open TeleOp and probe the numbers coming from the joystick, what do you get? Next you can see the values from the RobotDrive that is being sent to SmartDashboard. So what are those values? I suspect they are zeroes, and the next quest will be to figure out why.

Greg McKaskle

[Jack Gillespie]

Finally solved the problem, pulled up the example Arcade VI, notice the while loop, added a while loop the default project. Changed the Joystick in the USB setting of the Driver station and suddenly it all worked. Now we just have to figure out was it the DS setting or the while loop or both that solved the problem. We now have reliable camera and drive on our Proto-board. Now the Programmers can really start to work.

[Alan Anderson]

It was the joystick. Before you moved it to where the program expected it, the program was looking for values from a joystick that didn't exist.

I don't know where you put the While, but you should probably take it back out. It certainly doesn't belong in Teleop.

[Jack Gillespie]

Ok, the kids got the mockup board working in Arcade Drive.
They have been trying to set up tank drive. When the try it out one joystick will work driving one motor on the x-axes, and the other motor on the y-axes.
I have attached the teleop code they created. What are we doing wrong?

[Alan Anderson]

One of the joystick RefNum Get functions is actually a RefNum Set. That's a problem.

[ProgrammerJuan]

Hello Alan I'm Juan one of the programmers for Team 5430 and i have changed the joystick set to joystick get. There are two problems the joysticks are being read but there is no output, and its only reading one joystick so that one joystick runs two motors. We would love to receive your opinion on this problem.

[Alan Anderson]

I need to see Begin.vi in order to know where to focus on next. It sounds like you might not be opening or naming the joysticks the way you think you are.