Remote Driver Stations- what are they?

[tdbroun]

I noticed a new feature called a remote driver station on the 2014 driver station setup tab. Is there any documentation of this feature? What does it do, why do you want to do it, how do you set it up, etc...

[FrankJ]

It is remote dashboard, not driver station. You are not even required to use the dashboard. Presumably it lets the the dashboard to be on an another computer. I am not sure how useful it is for competition.

[Joe Ross]

As Frank said, the option is for a remote Dashboard, not a remote Driver Station. It's been there since the beginning.

Originally, the control system used extra data in the robot control packet (from robot to driver station) to send dashboard data. The driver station could forward that data to a dashboard running on the local PC, or over the network to another pc (remote dashboard). We used this to allow the programmers to monitor the dashboard on their own computer while it was being driven from another computer. However, the driver's computer dashboard wouldn't be receiving any data in that case.

More recently, everything has been moving to NetworkTables based Dashboards (SmartDashboard a few years ago, and the LabVIEW dashboard last year). The Robot is a server and can have multiple network tables clients (dashboards) connected. It does not use the the robot->ds data packet, and the local/remote dashboard option would have no effect.