NetworkTables issues / custom dash

[connor.worley]

At the Inland Empire regional, many teams using SmartDasboard encountered code crashes and a flurry of NetworkTables errors in NetConsole. One team using NetworkTables in their code encountered the same errors. I'm looking into writing a custom LV dashboard, but it looks like the legacy Dashboard data functions have been replaced by NetworkTables. Is there any way to avoid NetworkTables besides writing a custom protocol? Thanks.

[Andrew Lobos]

Was there a common programming language the teams with issues were running?

We have had no issues with the Java implementation of NetworkTables communicating with SmartDashboard

I know a lot of NetworkTables has been redone this year, so this may not be relevant, but in 2012 under C++ our robot would crash (not instantly) if we used any SmartDashboard calls. As I remember Netconsole was filled with NetworkTable errors.

[connor.worley]

Some teams using LabVIEW and C++ encountered the errors when using SmartDashboard. One Java team using NetworkTables directly also encountered the errors.

[apalrd]

The command packet still includes the LV dashboard protocol and it is accessible in LabVIEW

The underlying calls to Netcomm are the same for each language (3 function calls, get common control data, set common control data, set error data) and Netcomm supports it, so you should be able to modify the C++ or Java implementation of the WPIlib to access it. The protocol itself is very simple, it literally just sends two strings across the network. The functions just pack the string.

On the LV dashboard side it's still unbundled just not used.

You can send literal strings through the protocol by itself also, but make sure the strings aren't too big (I think there are around 900 bytes to work with).


We also use this older dashboard data system, and do not run a NetworkTables server at all on our robot (in LabVIEW). We deleted ALL references to NetworkTables (and basically everything else) and started from as low as possible.