Watchdog

[Greg McKaskle]

I'm not the rules expert, but in my opinion, you can disable the watchdog and still have a safe robot for competition. Here is why.

The system really has two watchdogs, each of which can shut down the I/O.

The primary watchdog, the system one, belongs to the communication system. It ensures that losing communications to the DS will stop the robot, and it ensures that disabling at the DS will stop the robot (by team or FMS). This watchdog alone is sufficient to make it safe in a competition. There is no way to turn this watchdog off and pass inspection.

The watchdog you are talking about is called the user watchdog, and its purpose is to recognize when your code isn't running loops where you update the I/O settings. Use it to feed the watchdog each time your controlling code goes through a loop that updates the most important I/O. This will protect the robot when your code hits a breakpoint in the development tools, and when the code locks up, crashes, or terminates the loop and stops controlling the I/O.

The user watchdog is probably most useful and important during development. My opinion on it is that if your robot is not on blocks, you should really use the watchdog. Some debugging is better done where the motors and I/O keeps going at a breakpoint. This is the primary reason the watchdog is allowed to be disabled, and clearly you want to be on blocks for that.

Greg McKaskle