Are drivers station input sent to robot during disabled mode?

[Mike Mahar]

We may need to tell the robot which alliance it is and which launch pad it is prior to the start of competition. Are the digital inputs on the drivers station sent to the robot in disabled mode prior to the start autonomous mode? That worked on last years controller.

[tvrobotics]

This is just a guess, but i think you can.

I've been looking at the disabled portion in the labview code a little bit, and it looks like you can have it do things while disabled. As long as you follow the rules that is.

So far i haven't seen a rule that prohibits doing calculations or anything passive while disabled.

I could be wrong, but that my take on the situation.

[Alan Anderson]

Driver Station inputs are seen by the cRIO when the system disabled. They are not seen during autonomous. I will test this afternoon whether the 2009 control system has the same "disable overrides autonomous" behavior as the 2004-2008 IFI system had.

[DarkOps_Developer]

Driver Station inputs are seen by the cRIO when the system disabled. They are not seen during autonomous. I will test this afternoon whether the 2009 control system has the same "disable overrides autonomous" behavior as the 2004-2008 IFI system had.

Currently the DS software passes everything to the robot regardless of which mode or state of enable. There will be an update in the near future that will be a required install prior to competitions that will prevent joystick/Digital input data from being sent during Autonomous / Enable mode of operation. All other flavors of modes will pass the data.

[Alan Anderson]

Currently the DS software passes everything to the robot regardless of which mode or state of enable.

I was extremely surprised today to discover that to be true. The Driver Station seems to be somewhat...unpolished.

[DarkOps_Developer]

It was intentionally left this way to allow for the software development to finalize for the user code (in particular for autonomous operation). The software construction for autonomous operation for starting and setting of the configuration had not yet settled at the time this image was generated. The DS image revision does in fact indicate the date the image was generated: Oct 10, 2008

[Bill_801]

I understand that the Autonomous Mode will not allow DS inputs from reaching the robot. Could someone that knows, please describe the sequence of modes for this years game. Specifically, Autonomous Independant mode can only be reached from power-up, right? When our students power-up the robot on the game floor, what will happen? What Mode is the FMS telling the robot; Autonomous Disabled? , Emergency Stop?, or some special Reset state that is holding back the Robot power-up?

[jross]

Specifically, Autonomous Independant mode can only be reached from power-up, right?

Autonomous Independent is started whenever the mode transitions into autonomous and enable (ie when current mode is autonoumous / enable AND previous mode was not autonomous / enable). There is no requirement that it can only run once after power up.

Depending on what you do in the autonomous independent, you may artificially force yourself into not being able to run it more then once (for example, opening devices without closing them). I wouldn't recommend doing that, though.

[Bill_801]

Thanks... I did finally find the code node that launches the Auto-Independant.vi down inside the Robot Mode.vi on the Robot Main.vi block diagram. And, I do now see how you get back to testing for Autonomous Independant execution every time around the main loop.

However, I still think it would be helpful to know the expected sequence of game modes before we get to our first competition.

[heydowns]

I agree with Bill - knowing if the DS will allow the passing back of I/O during "disabled before autonomous", as it has worked in prior years, is particularly important if the current behavior of the DS will change.

As it was, we were going to simply read the DS I/O during autonomous to determine things like our starting position and other autonomous parameters set by the drivers before the match commences.

If this will change, teams will need to change things to accommodate. Reading I/O during disabled-before-autonomous is an option (though, the way that WPIlib is structured, this is not as easily accomplished as one might hope).

If we will not be allowed to read I/O at all until the Teleop period starts, this is a bigger issue -- one could no longer set autonomous parameters on the DS prior to match start.