Watchdog replaced with MotorSafety?

[Bethie42]

We're having watchdog errors. We thought we'd isolated the problem to the camera, then to the driver station switches, then to the third joystick [heh], but we're still having issues. Using WindRiver.

1) We want to disable all User watchdogs, in order to see if we still get watchdog errors (ie, System watchdog/communications problem).
To this end, in the constructor we used GetWatchdog().SetEnabled(false).

Does anyone have experience with/opinions on troubleshooting System watchdog errors?

2) Then we learned about the MotorSafety class, which apparently replaces the User watchdog this year. This was hidden away in the documentation at FIRST Forge and I haven't seen any threads on CD about it yet. Does anyone have any info about MotorSafety, MotorSafetyHelper, and how to work with or disable them? I really wish the documentation had more updated info about working with watchdogs for the 2011 season.

We used robotDrive->SetSafetyEnabled(false) to disable the MotorSafety on the drive motors: to be safe, we even disabled the MotorSafety on our manipulator Jaguar, which supposedly is automatically disabled anyway.

Can anyone help us to disable all watchdogs? I can post/PM our code if you like.


3) We suspect the router. We're pretty sure our watchdog issues started after we replaced the old bridge on last year's bot [which we're prototyping everything on] with the DAP router. We don't seem to have watchdog errors while running tethered [we're going to test that more tomorrow]. Has anyone encountered watchdog/communication errors with the new router?

Also, we have a Jaguar mounted RIGHT next to the router: does anybody have experience with motors causing interference? Our issues also seemed to start right around the time we began using that Jag, but it's just a hunch.


Thank you so much for any help you can give!! We really really appreciate it

[Alan Anderson]

Here's one thread which mentions the new Safety feature.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by Bethie42

Also, we have a Jaguar mounted RIGHT next to the router: does anybody have experience with motors causing interference? Our issues also seemed to start right around the time we began using that Jag, but it's just a hunch.

It's a very good hunch. The first year of the cRIO control system, there were a few teams at the DC Regional that consistently lost communication with the field as soon as they tried moving. I worked with one team that had their WGA mounted RIGHT next to a speed controller, and relocating it solved the problem for their last few matches. I'm told that another team heard about the problem and fixed it the same way.

You're probably losing communication briefly whenever that Jaguar is told to activate the motor, resulting in the system watchdog triggering.

[Bethie42]

Originally Posted by Alan Anderson

It's a very good hunch. The first year of the cRIO control system, there were a few teams at the DC Regional that consistently lost communication with the field as soon as they tried moving. I worked with one team that had their WGA mounted RIGHT next to a speed controller, and relocating it solved the problem for their last few matches. I'm told that another team heard about the problem and fixed it the same way.

You're probably losing communication briefly whenever that Jaguar is told to activate the motor, resulting in the system watchdog triggering.

YAYY thank you! We're going to test that out tomorrow. And thanks a lot for the link to the previous post. Watchpuppies huh.....fun We do have some pneumatics, would those count as watchpuppy-whelping actuators as well? Well I should be able to dig into the WPILib sourcecode and find out easily enough.

Yeah, we've had watchdogs occur both right at startup, and after a predictable time lapse. We'll move the Jag.....we joked about sticking the router right at the top of our elevator system, heh....would about six inches be far enough, do you think? I think that is how far the router is from our drive-motor PWMs. And we'll sure take that into consideration when building the new chassis.

Again, thanks very much. I really appreciate your taking the time to respond. I'll report back here as to our success.

... Yay watchpuppies!