With the network settings tweaks we worked out in our CD thread from two weeks ago, our 2 limelight vision system worked wonderfully at our event this weekend. We went from just average cycling to being the bot with the top OPR at our event.
We had one issue come up though. The head ref had the lead robot inspector pass us the message that we were playing matches with both camera lights turned on all the time. We needed to either turn them off when not using them, or turn down the brightness. At this point, it was too late to turn down the brightness and recalibrate to the field lighting, so we did a software fix to turn them off automatically. This uncovered an interesting issue.
Iâm relaying second hand info here, so I might get some terminology wrong. We use Java, and when restarting, the first thing the code did was turn off the lights. During initial pit testing, this seemed to fix the problem, but after a battery swap, the lights were still turning on. We think the roboRIO boots more quickly than the limelights do, so the limelights were missing the initial command to turn them off. The programmers moved the command to run at the beginning of the autonomous code. Now, when the bot powers on, the lights come on. But, at the beginning of the match they turn off and stay off, unless we are using them for vision targeting.
Is this the right way to approach the problem, or is there a better way which will turn the lights off after powering up the bot?
