[Patrick Chiang]

We're writing our own Dashboard in Java. And we'll share when we're done with it. Probably at the end of build season. It's documented nicely, but the code itself is repetitive and will make all sane object-oriented programmers cry.

In the semi-likely event we don't get it done by shipping day, the code will get finished before the competition, debugged at the competition, and shared after the competition.

If your Java or C++ programmers are interested, we started by looking at the documentation for sockets and it turned out to be pretty simple. Run a server on the robot and client on the driver station. For some reasons the Java writeUTF method puts two extra bytes in front of each line we readLine, so we substring'ed them out in the client-side program.

After that, it was all just busy work getting the values to display on a nicely crafted dashboard (which we're still working on). I highly recommend the Swing GUI builder in Netbeans because it's easy to use. It has some general limitations but are easy to deal with. If all you want are string values to display, you can get it running in hours. If you want a nice GUI, it will take longer than that.