i'm not sure what the first dashboard program is, but i was developing sort of a dash board program for my team which was to be displayed on a laptop screen on the driver station
it was done in flash and i basically had the flash side done but since the major reason why it was being made (our CVT's) was never made a componenet of the robot, there wasnt really much use of this dashboard display
i may do some work on it more for next year's robot if there is use of it (CVT or complicated robot features). it also was supposed to show a map of the field with the robot in it using the data from our INS system which i dont think really was accurate enough in the long term anyway
all the data was to be sent using the few pins available that are sent back to the driver station, all the data was to be encoded but this part wasnt even started so i dont know how it would have went and i read here that people had some problems with this and indeed lets hope for better first hardware next year (would make things easier)
i have one picture of a really early version being developed at
http://users.wpi.edu/~piotrm/project...irst_hud_1.jpg
since its in flash it doesnt have direct access to hardware like the serial port so the intention was to write a tcp server to be run on that computer which would communicate with the hardware and serve the data via tcp (flash XML Socket routines). i have had much flash/tcp communication experience already (tacOps display server) so thats not the problem and can help anyone out if they are interested in doing something like this
good luck