Turning off automatic error logging in LabVIEW may improve loop timing

[Doug Norman]

This is the same as another post I made - just a more useful title.

In LabVIEW, FRC errors are automatically logged to a file on the robot at c:\WPI_Error.txt. This is the file that you see when you click "View Log File..." on the Driver Station. If you have not configured a Cypress board for Enhanced I/O, you may be getting errors constantly logged to file. This could affect the loop rates for Teleop etc. If you think this may be a problem, you can turn off the automatic error logging. It is easy to turn off, because it is controlled by a global variable.

To turn off error logging:

1. From your project, open the Begin.vi and switch to its diagram.

2. Click back on your project, then type Ctrl-F to bring up the Find Project Items dialog.

3. Type ErrorsGlobal into the dialog and hit Enter – it should highlight the ErrorsGlobal.vi in your project.

4. Drag ErrorsGlobal.vi from your project to the diagram of Begin.vi

5. It should drop on the diagram as "log errors to file?". If it does not, click on it and choose "log errors to file?"

6. This is a global variable. Wire a FALSE constant to it. To do this you can right-click on the terminal (along the left hand side) and choose Create>>Constant. Click on the T/F constant to change it from T to F.

The way this works is that when your Begin.vi runs, the global will be set to FALSE. Then down inside FRC error VIs the global is read. If an error occurs and the global is FALSE, nothing is written to the WPI_Error.txt file. Only FRC Errors from wired error terminals get logged. In our testing, the constant logging did not detrimentally affect our loop rates. However, if you have a lot of I/O happening in your loop (like vision), this might make a difference.