Autonomous user-input loophole?

[Jeff McCune]

Was working on the code late last night, and this scenario occured to me:

While in autonomous mode, it's likely that the Operator Interface user_mode button will still be enabled, so that we can get feedback from the robot running in the form of a byte or use our LED's on the OI. The first forums talk about disabling all user-input ports, but I'm going on the assumption that the PB_mode byte will remain untouched.

Looking at the Competition Port pinout, it seems as if they only can toggle the autonomous_mode bit. So unless their "extra" chip inside the OI is coded to mess with individual bits of the PB_mode byte, teams should still have control over the user_mode bit.

So here's my idea. You have a single bit, the user_mode bit, as input during the 15 second autonomous period. If it were not held static by the judging station, you could very easily use it to trigger events in your autonomous code such as turning at breakpoints, or waiting at the top of the ramp until user_mode goes low, or any number of things. You can do a lot with a single bit in 15 seconds.

Does anyone know the state of this? I personally don't plan on giving my autonomous code any input whatsoever, but it would be nice to know if other teams might be able to implement this questionable hack.

DISCLAIMER: This only occured to me. I and my team have no intention whatsoever of giving our robot any input during autonomous operation.