1st Post! ZomB Dashboard Troubles

[gizzerd91]

Long time lurker, first time posting. Hello everybody!

I'm trying to create a simple slider in ZomB that will let me set the speed of our shooter for testing out the range/rpm ratio on our shooter. I set up a slider in Visual ZomB, named it "Shooter Speed", and then wrote in my teleopPeriodic() in Java

try {
     shooterGoalSpeed = dashboard.getInt("Shooter Speed");
} catch (NetworkTableKeyNotDefined ex) {
     ex.printStackTrace();
}

Trouble is, I keep getting the NetworkTableKeyNotDefined exception

[cRIO]edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.networktables.NetworkTableKeyNotDefined
[cRIO]     at edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.networktables.NetworkTable.getInt(NetworkTable.java:522)
[cRIO]     at edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.smartdashboard.SmartDashboard.getInt(SmartDashboard.java:140)
[cRIO]     at edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.templates.RobotTemplate.teleopPeriodic(RobotTemplate.java:147)
[cRIO]     at edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.IterativeRobot.startCompetition(IterativeRobot.java:145)
[cRIO]     at edu.wpi.first.wpilibj.RobotBase.startApp(RobotBase.java:156)
[cRIO]     in virtual method #10 of javax.microedition.midlet.MIDlet(bci=17)
[cRIO]     at javax.microedition.midlet.MIDletTunnelImpl.callStartApp(64)
[cRIO]     at com.sun.squawk.imp.MIDletMainWrapper.main(110)
[cRIO]     in virtual method #95 of com.sun.squawk.Klass(bci=25)
[cRIO]     at com.sun.squawk.Isolate.run(1506)
[cRIO]     at java.lang.Thread.run(231)
[cRIO]     in virtual method #47 of com.sun.squawk.VMThread(bci=42)
[cRIO]     in static method #3 of com.sun.squawk.VM(bci=6)

I've tried all the different data types, and all sorts of different component names (without spaces, with numbers, etc), but nothing helps. I'm sure this is something stupid I overlooked, but I've been at it four hours and I'm not making any headway. Any ideas?
My ZomB Dashboard is working great otherwise, I have encoders mapped to graphs and the camera is showing up. It's an awesome program. If you haven't tried it out, I would highly recommend it.

[pblankenbaker]

We ran across this same issue at one point. I don't have the robot in front of me, but I think the solution was to add a line in the robot initialization code to set a initial value for each SmartDashboard key name we wanted to retrieve before we started retrieving it.

Here's a example (from a SimpleRobot based perspective):

private int shooterSpeed = 0;

public void robotInit() {
  // Tell SmartDashboard to register a "Shooter Speed" key and initial value.
  SmartDashboard.putInt("Shooter Speed", shooterSpeed);
}

public void operatorControl() {

   while (isOperatorControl() && isEnabled()) {

      // Read value of "Shooter Speed" back from the dashboard
      int newSpeed = SmartDashboard.getInt("Shooter Speed", shooterSpeed);

      // If operator wants a new speed, update robot state to accomodate
      if (newSpeed != shooterSpeed) {
        doWhatYouNeedToDoOnASpeedChange(newSpeed);
      }

      Timer.delay(0.01);
   }

}

[gizzerd91]

We tested that already, and it doesn't help. I'm switching to SmartDashboard, so I just wrote a custom widget that gets at the NetworkTable from within the program. Haven't tested it yet, but that seems like it should work. I'll test it as soon as I get back into the shop.

[byteit101]

what control are you using? some controls don't send data back