We had this exact problem. The Dashboard example project, as you've stated, does nothing related to the ACTUAL dashboard other than show you HOW to send the data elements.
For more detailed background, see my post here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ight=dashboard
We made a
generic implementation to pack the DashboardDataFormat class with the actual data being sent out of the cRIO modules, globally, on all channels. This has the advantage of
not caring at all what driver classes you are using for the various I/Os (ie, doesn't matter if you have a gyro or a potentiometer connected to a channel - it just gets the raw channel value, as in prior years' dashboard).
However, to do this, we had to change WPILib slightly, because the default class interfaces are too restrictive to provide this information.
I've suggested this change to the WPIlib maintainers.
If someone would like to see the function we wrote to do this (knowing you need to change WPILib to use it), let me know and I'll try to extract it out and put it somewhere to share.