Things learned from the 2012 regional

[daniel_dsouza]

Hello CD,

I would like to know what you learned about the control system and FMS from your regional experience this season. It would be great to have all those little tricks be common knowledge.

One trick is that after you tether your robot, you should power cycle it before competing to prevent potential connection problems.

Another trick is to not let things short out that are attached to the control system.
Example: Our robot hit the field hard our first match, and as a result, two wires touched, shorting our our bridge momentarily. For the next two matches, either just the auton code or no code would run. Now what we thing happened is that the short messed up our memory on the cRIO. According to our mentor, memory messup would prevent our team from running updated versions of our code. We tried everything from power cycles to reimaging everything. In the end, we had to rewrite all our code in a completely different way, so that the programs would be different enough, and would compile differently enough. The same thing also happened to another team.

What have you learned?