Teleop Issue - Motor Control Seems to Freeze

[Aren Siekmeier]

I think your problem may be the Delay and Feeds in your Periodic Tasks case. Right now, when you press the joystick button, it picks the true case and executes all the solenoid and watchdog vis in the order defined by the error lines. Since the delays total to 3 seconds, I think it will take 3 seconds to run this while loop once when you start the kicker sequence. I'm not sure if this disallows Teleop from running (I kind of doubt it, this it is running parallel to and independent of Timed Tasks in Robot Main), but it may cause some undesirable overhead. At the very least it will keep everything else in that 100 ms loop from executing properly (whatever else that is).

A state machine is probably what you want here, as it will execute each of these steps in the kicker sequence at the appropriate times without interfering with the rest of your code. We have a state machine for our kicker that stores a variable (enums are usually appropriate) for the current state, such as loaded, fire, wait, reload, wait, etc. or however your kick sequence goes. In periodic tasks, a case structure reads this state and picks the appropriate case, and it is these cases which contain the solenoid set VIs. For the timing you could use a tick count block to store a time when you first enter a state, and then go to the next state (write the next state to the state variable) when the desired time has elapsed. Actually, our state variable is jsut initialized outside the while loop and then fed back with a shift register, so only the state machine can change its own state. Hopefully that made some sense...

I've attached our Periodic Tasks.vi. Our state machine is in the 20ms loop, and reads the global variable Kick?, which is set to the joystick button in TeleOp.