Comments/Complaints on NI control system

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by Chris Hibner

As far as we're concerned, our autonomous is set up so that it can only run once no matter what. Once it starts, you're forced to cycle power to get it to go again. So for us, the STOP button is just as good as the disable since we're going to have to reboot to do another test anyway. I guess if we test using LabVIEW's play button, we can just push the LabVIEW stop and then play again to clear the memory and that is much quicker than a full reboot, but with deployed code it doesn't matter how we end auton.

You better make sure that your drive team completely understands this limitation. At an event I was watching this weekend, the robots were enabled for autonomous, the foghorn sounded .5 second later, then the robots were re-enabled .5 second later. It was probably a mistake by the field operator who fat-fingered the stop button. My first reaction was "didn't that just mess up everyone's autonomous? What if they can only run autonomous once?" If you have the limitation that Chris mentioned, you'd better be sure your drive team raises a stink if that ever happens in your match.

Greg, I'll be happy if someone fixes the bug I reported a month ago. Can anyone else confirm that this is a problem with their setup?