Telling drivers station your alliance

[Mike Mahar]

The drivers station can tell the cRio which alliance it is on. How can we test this? How do we tell the drivers station which alliance it is for testing? Is it a wire on the competition port? If we can't test a feature before the tournament, we can't use it.

[Mike Mahar]

Does no one know the answer to this? We'd like to use the GetAlliance call in the driversstation class but can't if there is no way for us to set the alliance. We can't wait until competition day to test it on a real arena.

[NateSmith]

I don't have the specific answer to your question, but I do have a suggestion...

In lieu of being able to directly test this(which is not a new problem to this year - think back to the "OI state between match segments" discussion from previous years), an easy way to handle this issue would be any of the following:

• Write your code in such a way that it could detect if the alliance was being set, and revert back to a toggle switch if not.
• Add in a three position toggle (On-off-On) wired to two digital inputs that would allow you to have a setting for red alliance, blue alliance, and one for 'use field setting'
• Have code written that works both ways, and load the appropriate code based on a future Q&A response or testing during practice at the regional.

[DarkOps_Developer]

FIRST is working on a FMS lite version to allow just this sort of operation and testing. It is not yet ready for prime time...