Team Fusion's take on cRIO and LabView

[RyanN]

First off... Wow! What a complex system we have to work with.

Well, I went to Gulfport High School today to help the students on the team setup the new control system and play with it a bit. We had our problems and still have a lot to do before we can even think of putting it on a real robot.

We first started the day with firmware upgrades... this went well and according to plan. We were able to test the whole rig and found it to work. We shut the "robot" off and back on and found that the motors just started to run on their own!!! What the heck is going on? This is default code and its doing this. Reset it and it didn't do it again. Later we were just trying to establish a connection and didn't have any joysticks connected. Again, the motors started spinning! I'm not going to lie; I haven't searched for this problem and don't know if this is common.

I also noticed that our 5V LED indicator for the 5V output on the PD board does not work. I know for a fact that it is outputting at 5V and powers the camera just fine. I'm thinking the LED has reverse polarity from the factory or something... not sure... I'm not worried about the functionality, but I do want to know if the inspection people would be looking for this, as it's not an error by us, but just a defect. The captain this year was saying that we would have to ship everything back if something was broken, so I don't want to go that route. Here's a picture:

The gray thing is the camera with the power light on, and below is the 5V LED off...

I'm also curious to how many teams are clueless on how to use LabVIEW. I've had no experience with it and had my first large dose today. My brain is drained and I have a headache...

Overall, this is a complicated and powerful system. It should really give teams with LabVIEW experience a great benefit. They're holding a workshop at NASA this Saturday that I'm going to go to for a few hours until our family gathering begins.

I'll post updates on our team's progress or other members may post updates.