Yesterday when we were testing some motors on our offseason testbed, we decided that we wanted to update our Talon SRX motor controllers from v1.4 to v2.0. The update went fine, we connected to the roboRIO web interface and loaded the firmware located in C:\Users\Public\Public Documents.
However, after we tried driving the bot, the drivetrain would either stay stationary, or only one side would move (it was not always the same side). At first we chalked this up to a programming error, but after disabling all the code that was not pertinent to the drivetrain, the behavior continued. I reverted to last night’s code and even our Feed Forward Code that we developed in the offseason, both of which worked wonderfully the day prior, but to the same effect. Of course, we restarted all the things (LabVIEW, Computer, Robot), but that did not work either.
Only after reverting to v1.4, were we able to get the desired behavior from the testbed.
Is there something wrong with the way we updated the firmware, or is there a known issue with v2.0 that we missed?
Are you using CAN or PWM to drive the Talons? If you use CAN you may need to re-address them. Check the GUI on the RoboRio for proper device IDs. We’ve not upgraded ours yet but I know sometimes a f/w upgrade can wipe out configuration data.
Hey All,
Bringing this thread to a close: root-cause is the LabVIEW team project had forked implementations of some Talon-centric VIs, but not all. The VIs were forked for performance reasons. So updating to 2016 meant the application used some old (forked) VIs and some new VIs, effectively breaking Talon-use.
I generally recommend to teams to always use the stock Talon VIs - BUT, if you REALLY need to make changes to be successful, you should kit all related VIs so future RIO updates don’t lead to a mixed bag of things.