Network Communications

[sjcbulldog]

I am a new SW mentor for this upcoming season. I bought the roboRIO control kit w/ two motors and built a software development station (Frankenbot) to learn all I can about the environment. In playing with various things I found something that seemed odd and wanted to understand if this is part of the environment. I have simplified what I was playing with down to this ...

I created a very simple c++ Robot application using Eclipse. This application is just the template application created by the new project wizard. I compile and deploy the application and use the driver station to put the robot in test mode, and then enable the robot. From here, if I connect to the roboRIO in a browser via the web address, or ssh to the robot, or any other non-driver station network communications the robot is disabled. I can immediately enable it again via the driver station, but any further network connections disables the robot.

Is this normal behavior for the roboRIO runtime environment? Is there some type of watchdog looking for non-First sanctioned traffic between the driver station and the robot?

As quirky as the smart dashboard is, I wanted to play with a way to tune closed loop control by communicating from the robot application to an external application. No communications during competition, but during the build season. But from this it does not look possible.

Thanks
Jack Griffin