Comments/Complaints on NI control system

[heydowns]

Originally Posted by Greg McKaskle

II.C. This feature was requested and implemented in beta to provide additional safety. Since the laptops are self-powered, it helps to prevent a team from being able to drive a robot at the field until the FMS allows it. It does mean Exiting and restarting driver again, but that took 45 seconds in my test?

A bit of an aside here, since I don't have comments on the majority of the thread topic...

During our first competition this past weekend, we found this particular feature to be quite intrusive, especially during elimination matches where you can have as little as 6 minutes to remove your robot from the field, reset it to a starting condition, and get it back out there and re-connected to the field.

In our experience 45 seconds probably describes a mean, but we've seen upwards of 2 minutes; the DS software has to exit, Windows logs out the Driver user, user logs back in as Driver, then the DS software has to load again, and finally Cypress recognition and USB enumeration are complete.

Perhaps in the future, field management architecture could be revised to place the burden of safety and field control actually on FMS, rather than relying on the DS.

In the short term, seems like having a way to restart the DS without logging out the Windows account and logging it back in again might help shorten the cycle time somewhat.
Or... perhaps having a way to clear FMS locked when Ethernet physical connection (not robot comms, physical connection) is lost for more than a few seconds?