Suspicious of the Watchdog VI - Encoder doesn't work (Archived)

[JX.Y]

Update: This discussion applies to Issues from the 2010 FTC season and is no longer relevant for current FTC competition software.

You no longer need to program the watchdog, the commands are integrated into the wait function so as long as you wait in your loop you will be able to program anything you need.

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We use one encoder on one of our motors. It should be functioning normally, but now the motors move like the encoder doesn't exist. It moved the same amout of distace (and time, of course)

no matter what the emcoder count is set to, either 10 or 4000. It stopped at about 3 seconds, which made me really suspicious of the watchdog VI. The watchdog stops the motor every 2.5 seconds unless it's in a loop. But that situation still happens even if I created a new test file and wired only watchdog (in a 1 sec loop) and "move a certain distance". Can someone help me with that? Thanks in advance.

[Tanya_V]

Hi,

If you remove the watchdog VI do you see the same behavior or does it resolve itself? The FTC templates don't require you to add watchdog VIs since it is built into the motor controller VIs.

Try running an FTC example to see if that runs correctly.

Take care!

Tanya

[JX.Y]

Thanks for your help! We still have trouble using the TETRIX encoders. Here is a screen shot of our test program. I have tried deleting the watchdog loop, as well as changing encoders counts. However it still won't work!! It still stops after running for 3 seconds. There must be something wrong in the software... Needs help!! Very much appreciate it!

[Ben_J1]

JX.Y,

   Try disabling the while loop on the bottom. What will happen is the VI will execute through with the usual data flow which will execute the top code once and with repeat executing the while loop until it is done (and it is hard wired not to stop executing). Is this inside another loop or is this the top level VI?

Regards from Austin,

Ben James

Applications Engineer

National Instruments