Driver Station Blinking Teleop Enabled

[ericgever]

Not sure if this is the right discussion area for new Driver Station comments, but testing SystemCore for the first time finally allowed me to see all the behaviors of the new driver station. I find the blinking yellow when the robot is enabled to be highly distracting when viewing dashboard telemetry and was wondering if there was a way to toggle this off (to a solid color)?

[ThadHouse]

No, there is no way to toggle it off. It's meant to simulate the RSL and be a notification to everyone around that the robot is enabled and can move.

[ericgever]

I wish it could be colored green at least. As someone who designs spacecraft graphical interfaces for my day job, blinking yellow (and red) are typically reserved as immediate caution and warning indicators that there's a problem. As such, we use yellow and red boolean indicators on the Dashboard to indicate nonready states on the robot (turret not in position, not in offense period during match, etc).

[ThadHouse]

We're trying to be more color blind inclusive, which is why it is yellow. We're actually debating moving more things to yellow and purple, and to stop using green and red.

[qwertychouskie]

Yellow in place of red makes sense, but yellow in place of green conveys exactly the opposite of the intended intent. Yellow for "warning/error" and purple for "good" are probably OK, though personally I'd recommending making it an optional mode.

Regardless, going back to the "virtual RSL", blinking yellow definitely conveys the incorrect information. Warning fatigue is already a huge issue; in my ~decade in FTC most teams usually already ignore big yellow warning text warning them of actual issues. I blame the fundamental issue on modern consumer tech, where the big flashy "designed-to-be-scary-looking" stuff is usually an ad or scam they should ignore, therefore training most people to actively ignore warnings. Obviously WPILib can't fix the state of the 2026 consumer tech industry, but I would strongly advise avoiding making the issue worse. (I would rather avoid the next decade of FTC being filled with me trying to explain to highschoolers (and middleschoolers) "this giant blinking yellow warning means everything is working and should be ignored, but this small yellow text is an actual warning that means something is very wrong with the robot and should be paid attention to"...)

[ericgever]

If the goal is to be colorblind friendly, I would recommend use of the Okabe-Ito color palette which also includes a couple different shades of blue to indicate nominal robot operation. I agree that yellow is a poor choice to indicate normal behavior of the robot and driver station in a tele-operated state.

[ThadHouse]

We're switching it to be solid orange, and getting rid of the flashing. An enabled robot is inherently an "unsafe" state, so we want that to be known. The colors being looked at right now is purple is safe, orange and yellow are unsafe. And enabled is an unsafe state.