Troubles with Talon SRX in Follower mode

[Alan Anderson]

Unless you expect to be running the first two Talons in a closed-loop mode, you'll probably be better off just leaving things as a 4 Motor drive and removing the Follow setup completely.

[jfitz0807]

I'll change it to a two motor drive. We're using the closed loop for our autonomous.

Thanks for all the help.

[jmullins16]

...additional Talon follower (kFollower) mode info...

We had a problem where Talon follower mode was initialized in our Chassis subsystem constructor, but those talons would not follow when first powering on the robot.

If we just restarted the robot code using the driver station, follower mode worked correctly.

We discovered that if we instantiated RobotDrive, did a single call to set the drive motors to zero, and then set up follower mode in the constructor, it all worked correctly.

As a failsafe we will be re-initializing the drive system followers in TeleopInit and AutonomousInit.

[ozrien]

This sounds exactly like what was fixed in the 2-24-2015 update in wpilib (C++). Are you using C++?

This is explained in a team update....
http://contentviewer.adobe.com/s/FIR...24.html#page_0

And re-explained in section 21.18 in the Talon SRX software ref manual.
http://crosstheroadelectronics.com/control_system.html

Your workaround is also documented as well.

[jmullins16]

We are using C++.

The update was definitely installed prior to our testing/fix yesterday. It did not appear to address this issue in any way.

And I can see how the C++ update description is intended to apply to CAN enabling, but we were debugging the fact that the only Talons affected were in follower mode, we didn't quite read the description that way. All other CAN Talons were operating normally.

Regardless, an immediate Set() is the right thing to do, and we're on track now. Just hoping to help others who might be having problems with follower mode.

[ozrien]

So you updated your eclipse plugins and rebuilt your application? Redeployed, rebooted and still found that your slave Talons were not driving? Were they blinking orange or solid orange?

[jmullins16]

Yes, we had rebuilt our application (clean), redeployed, rebooted (also tried powering off completely), and the slave Talons were not following at first power on. Rebooting the cRIO did not correct the problem. Restarting the code *did* correct the problem.

Both sets of following Talons were flashing orange similar to disabled state.

If we get time to try this again without the workaround this weekend, would it be useful to have the results?

[ozrien]

can you confirm what lib version shows up for wpilib C++ in the driverstation?

Diagnostic tab..
http://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/...ation-software

[prubic]

our lib version for c++ is 1.2.0
the plugin version for c++ that we have is: 0.1.0.20152241928

[ozrien]

That sounds right. If you can, send your source to support@crosstheroadelectronics.com with your workaround commented out.

Don't worry about it being "not pretty", just leave it as is.

At least that way we can get the root-cause nailed down and better help other teams.