Watch dog errors

[circlemonger]

Hi so we just got are but up and going over the dap in ap mode. But when running are code through the wifi are motors will skip and stop for a second and start at a fast speed causing are bot to almost flip. And when I look at the driver station diagnostics we get a watchdog error and an that something like loop right and left motors running slow. sorry i cant get the exact error message because im at home right now but i will post the actual errors tommorow. any idea what could be wrong?

[Lioncat55]

sorry for the spelling of my friend here. when we switched from wifi to wired we had no problems, nothing is wired wrong. we have the Router about 1ft away from the motor. we have had the computer less then 4 feet away from the router. i will test and see if the router is lossing power for half a second tomorrow, if that does not work any thoughts?

[AndrewN]

Here's my best guess: you are over driving the motors by pasing a number greater than 1.0 into the motor controls. One of our programmers was doing this thinking that the range was 0 to 100 like FTC. This is causing the jaguars to go hard on, tripping the over current limit they have built in (and a 1/2 second dead period), the watchdog also starts reporting errors but this is a red herring.

Have your programmers hard code the speed of the motors to 10% (0.1) bypassing the joystick scaling etc.

If this is not the cause then you really do have the motor watchdog doing it's job. Somewhere else in the program it is stalling (waiting?) and causing the motor speeds not to be updated often enough.

You could turn off the motor watchdogs (safetyEnable) and see if the problem goes away but even if it does the problem is still there and the non-responsiveness will happen somewhere else. Best to track down the cause of the watchdog error and fix that.

[circlemonger]

hi andrew i havent changed any thing in the labview default code for the frc crio project so im prety sure it isnt that we are over driving.

[Kevin_F · Accepted solution]

I think the key here is that the system works fine when wired and only when operating wirelessly do we see issues. Seems like you are probably loosing connection to the robot or maybe having latency issues. Are you running the code in interactive mode or as a startup executable? Do you get an errors other than the watchdog on the diagnostics page? What state are the status lights in?

[circlemonger]

hi kevin so we figured out the are problem was that we the d-link to close to the dc-dc converter causing the motors to skip

[Lioncat55]

more like droped packets and not just the motors skiping. we have a video thats getting uploaded someware. one of us will link later.

[circlemonger]

here is the link lioncat is talking about http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QzBvga2W2E

[Kevin_F]

Interesting. Must be getting some serious noise from the dc-dc converter. Thanks for posting your solution to this issue.