[Arhowk]

Honestly, I think that the SmartDashboard was only built for debugging functions, as its competition usefulness is extremely limited. I attempted to use SmartDashboard at first, but what I ended up doing is just making a custom .jar and using a custom byte processor to send messages between the dashboard and the robot. This made customization and vision processing ALOT easier.

The LabView NI Vision resources are... well... underdeveloped. They're useful, but you can't debug anything, view threshholds, etc. WPIJavaCV is slightly useful, but it's not really up to par. I ended up using the OpenCV for Java built-in implementation to do threshholding than converted it into a BufferedImage and did the parallelogram detection by hand.

Unless 2014SD is alot better in terms of competition usefulness this is your best choice. You can't adjust font sizes, you can't add static labels, you cant use HTML formatting, the save/loading of layouts breaks often, the Preferences widget breaks the ftp server, theres no good vision processing widget (hm.. I should make one that would be awesome), you cant swap in and out of pages easily (i have over 8 panels that i switch between based on debug, experienced driver, inexperienced driver, etc.)

Also, if your having problems with autonomous, have you ever tried command-based? I wrote a short little segment of code (100 lines) that lets me do every autonomous (we had static 3disc, 3disc + pyra, 3disc + back, etc) in 10 lines or less.