When does the light have to turn on?
Is it when your robot is powered on manually, or when the match starts and you gain control of your robot?
It has to be powered by a spike relay which is kept constantly turned on by your program. (If you’re using the default program, it must be attached to relay output 8.) The effect is that the light will come on when your robot is enabled, and go off when it is disabled.
Don’t make the mistake of programming it so that it takes a switch to come on. They don’t like that. It must come on when the robot comes on.
Am I correct in that if the OI isn’t talking to the RI then the light shouldn’t be on? In other words, it can’t come on until you are given control.
*Originally posted by Wetzel *
**Am I correct in that if the OI isn’t talking to the RI then the light shouldn’t be on? In other words, it can’t come on until you are given control. **
You’re sort of right in that the light doesn’t come on until you are given control. However the OI and RC continuously communicate as long as they both have power (assuming they are set up properly with the team number and channel, etc.) The user program you downloaded to your robot even runs the whole time the robot is disabled. You can verify this (assuming you have a yellow dongle ™ with which you can disable your robot) by putting debug statements in your code. You can see that the RC receives all the inputs from the OI and the analog and digital inputs on the robot. What happens when the robot is enabled, and you gain control is that the data your user program sends in the serout command actually get acted upon. (They are ignored by the master microprocessor as long as the robot is disabled.)