Robot not receiving input from Rio/drive station?

Technical NI LabVIEW
1

Looking for advice for what I think is either a wiring issue or a communication issue to our driver station.

When our robot is tether connected to the driver station, we get green lights on comms, robot code, and joysticks - yet our robot doesn’t function.

Some background info: we’re using Labview, with just the generic tank drive code from wpilib. We are using spark motor controllers with pwm connection. We have made sure that the right pwms and joysticks are called in the code.

We have also flashed our radio and updated rio firmware (Rio imaging tool shows we are running the 2022 version).

One thing I have noticed - I know spark motor controller’s signal lights blink when they are on, but the robot is not enabled - then when the robot is enabled, the signal lights are supposed to go solid. However, ours remain blinking even when the driver station is enabled. Like I mentioned, we have green lights on the driver station for comms, robot code, and joysticks.

Any ideas or advice as to what might be going on?

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We have also checked to make sure the driver station is receiving input from the joysticks, so our joystick isn’t bad.

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There’s a few things it’ll help to check to start with.

  1. This is likely a long-term thing and not immediately useful. The DS can show joystick activity and your code is still setup incorrectly. When you mentioned checking joysticks in code, can you share the process you used? We may need to work with this later.
  2. The likely issue relates to the motor controllers. If you enable and the lights don’t go solid blue, that tells us there’s a problem somewhere. Let’s focus our attention here. As a first step, can you share your code so we can verify (as a sanity check) the PWM ports? It’ll help to also get a picture of the roboRIO to help verify the wiring.
  3. If that all looks right, make sure both ends of the PWM cabling is seated tightly.
  4. If that looks right, try flipping the direction of the connector on the roboRIO PWM. It’s easy to plug them in backwards.

As long as the lights don’t turn on, we want to focus efforts on wiring and PWM configuration in your code. When that’s right, we’d see the solid light. If that isn’t working, we’d want to verify the joystick configuration.

If you have the Spark MAX controllers, you may find CAN isn’t much more complicated than the PWM attempts. Though, let’s stick with trying to narrow down the PWM issue first.

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