Custom Driver Station on the Field

[MikeF1617]

Originally Posted by MrRoboSteve

Another thing to try is to close and reopen the driver station and dashboard prior to connecting to the field.

This may fix it, except after connecting to the field and being sure the robot code is started (boot your robot before going onto the field and peeking at other driver stations to see if FMS is established or seeing if team numbers are on correct on the player stations). I found that the TCP connection (contains all the network variables) does not open for some reason with the dashboard code if the robot has not been started up first and the FMS hasn't established a connection yet, it matters the boot order of the robot code and the FMS connection. I found that if you wait on opening the dashboard (logging into driver on the classmate PC if you have it as start-up), everything works fine. I created indicators that indicate when the dashboard establishes connection with the robot by checking to see if a code revision was written to a network variable by the robot, this or checking your variables tab will tell you if you have connected.

We set our autonomous mode before the match starts, and it is stored in a global variable (not necessary but we have dashboard code and robot code separated in different loops in different areas, its a custom structure) on the robot, and that does the trick, as long as there is a connection to the dashboard established. This seems to be a bug with the dashboard code, and if other people are having this issue, then I would assume its a problem with the code provided in the WPIlib or the TCP just doesn't work well in certain scenarios for some reason, and I haven't found a fix yet. Its a pretty weird problem.