My team is having a serious problem working with the field. In the pits we operate fine. As soon as we connect to any field practice or real we get an error every second or two reporting that the tank drive vi is bogged down. I can’t believe this to be code since I started fresh with just task drive in a desperate attempt to remove the problem but no dice. Please help if you can I can’t play in a match if our bot keeps lagging after connection.
More often then not, the field is not to blame. They use super high quality equipment that for the most part does not lag or have traffic issues with a normal robot load. However, if you think it is for sure the field, you could talk with your FTA about looking through the log data on your robot. They may not be willing or able to, but you could try.
I would also recommend finding the NI Representative for your event and having them take a look.
good luck
Make sure your robot is up high and as exposed as you can get while still keeping it safe from contact with other robots.
I apologize to interject but I believe that you meant to say radio is up high and keeping it safe from other robots. 1647 had a similar issue last year where we had intermittent communications with the radio nestled in the dead center of the bot under multiple motors and such.
Yes, I meant radio ::ouch::
Thanks!
Thank you for the advice I sure hope this works
While in the pits, check the CPU usage on the robot, you can do this by plugging your computer into the radio with an ethernet cable and looking at the Charts tab while the robot is enabled. There is a legend, but I believe that CPU usage will be a red line. If this is at or near 100% you are doing to much processing on the cRIO for one reason or another, so it can’t process incoming packets as fast, and therefore it can’t process the joysticks as fast. Another thing to check in there is trip time and dropped packets, since you will be plugged into the radio, you should be able to see if it is a wifi or programming issue, because if it is wifi, the trip times will be way down, if it is programming, they will still be high.
Good Luck,
Oliver
Are you using a camera and are you diplaying the images on the dashboard? If so, disable the video display. This is a big load on the classmate. You can also see the chart data in much more detail by using the Driver Station Log Viewer. I think it is located in the c:\program files\driver station folder on the classmate.
the lag MIGHT be due to the camera’s fps rate. My team experienced this problem today- we had the fps rate unlimited since we didn’t find any rules limiting us. But then we ran into some problems in a match and had to put the camera’s fps rate down to 20 fps- and the problem was fixed!
good luck!
At the Finger Lakes, the head inspector was going around to teams that were having packet loss and advising them to change the camera FPS from 30 to 10 in the driver station code. We were one of them. We did not notice any negative affect at 30, but some teams did. It defaults in the LabView driver station project to 30 FPS. I can’t remember the name of the VI to change, but in the middle loop, there will be an IMAQ object outside the loop. You should be able to find the FPS constant of 30. Change it to 10, re-build, then replace the existing exe in the driver station program folder (rename existing exe to save it).
You could disable the camera if you aren’t actively using it and test. You could just unplug it’s Ethernet cable.
If you haven’t improved things yet, I’ll add that you can use the Log File Viewer to look at logged data for a given match. It is located in the Program Files/FRC Driver Station folder. The interesting data will be the round trip time (green), lost packets (blue), and CPU usage (red). If you want more interpretation, you can upload a picture of the graph or upload the log file. Files are stored in the Public Documents/FRC/Logs.
Greg McKaskle
are you reciving an error to the effect of " the loop that contains robot drive is running too slow"? if so, this will cause problems with the FMS.