Spontaneous motor skipping?

[TubaMorg]

Originally Posted by 360skier

The watchdog works like a timer. If it doesn't receive a feed command from your code every so often, it shuts down your output. This is to prevent you from setting your motors to full forward, and then lagging the classmate so you can't shut them off.

If you look at the watchdog methods (or blocks if you're using labview), there should be one something like SetPeriod which takes a float. This will allow you to specify the watchdog timeout, in seconds I believe. Making this slightly longer will hopefully stop causing the intermittent motor shutdown you've been seeing.

Yes this is what I meant by widen the setpoint. I apologize for the vague terminology! Avoid the temptation to set it too long, it really is an important safety feature. As leav pointed out, more than 0.5 seconds is too long. Our Java had a default of 0.2 seconds that we changed to 0.4. If your code is getting stuck somewhere for longer than this, it definitely needs some optimization work