Controlling Autonomous GamePlan

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by nathanww

The competition sequence goes:
watchdog override->disabled->autonomous->disabled(?)->teleop->disabled

The first part of that apparently isn't always the case when using FMS-lite. We didn't spend any time trying to figure out exactly what was going on at CAGE, but our 2009 robot's autonomous didn't run consistently. Its autonomous selection defaults at bootup to "none", reads an analog input from the Driver Station a half second into disabled mode to set the desired routine, and uses that setting as soon as it gets enabled. It also allows the operator to step through the routines using a pair of joystick buttons at any time before autonomous mode is commanded. The currently selected mode is displayed on the bottom line of the DS display. Even though we only had one routine programmed, and the pot on the analog input was locked in place, we discovered that we sometimes had to use the alternate method to force the autonomous program to run at all.

There was enough field-control frustration that day for us to just shrug and do whatever worked.