[Greg McKaskle]

Story-time, story-time:

The initial libraries for FRC were a collaboration between NI, WPI, and FIRST. They try to expose all of the capabilities of the cRIO and kit of parts with numerous levels of abstraction.

From the beginning, we wanted to include a higher level communication feature and attempted to use something from NI called Network Variables. Unfortunately, they were very heavyweight with lots of features and not really focused on the right things. For that reason, they were withheld and the communications were achieved with TCP and UDP sockets.

A few years ago, WPI students released SmartDashboard to display values and used NetworkTables to communicate the data between robot and dashboard. The NetworkTable exposed named tables filled with variables. The table named SmartDashboard contains the ones for display, and other tables could be used for other purposes.

This last year, the protocol was reworked and the implementations were simplified and provided for all major languages and major tools.

We briefly considered other names to help make it clear what was what, but none of them could overcome the momentum.

Does that help?
Greg McKaskle