Labview Dashboard

[Peter Randall]

OK, so we've finished the benchmark tests and have installed the cRIO in last year's BetaBot. We got it running well using the default FRC VIs and are now working on sensors and solenoids. As we have experimented with the FRC framework, we have been using the Dashboard to montor inputs. Our question is, how do you add user data such as the output from a gyro or wheel encoder to the dashboard? We can see the raw input, but want to display the processed data which is significantly more informative. Any good ideas?

PGR

[Mr. Lim]

Peter,

Your best bet is to add a few display controls to the Front Panel of your actual FRC cRIO project. By default it should only have a single button entitled "Enable Camera." But you are free to add whatever sliders, dials, display, and even "water tanks" that you please. You will be free to hook up these displays to your post-processed sensor values, and they should update quickly enough to be useful.

Although this is all completely separate from the dashboard, it's all still very useful.

[Peter Randall]

While that certainly works in temp deployed mode, if you are running in fully deployed mode on the cRIO as I believe we will have to do in competition, how can you see the front panel from the cRIO app - it doesn't actually run on the PC anymore. I presumed that you would have to run the separate Dashboard app on your PC and use the data transfer between the cRIO and the PC to display live data. It works with the raw data and the camera "out of the box" but how can we add our own data to the data stream.

PGR

[Joe Ross]

You can use the Set User Data VI to send data to the dashboard. However, there is a bug right now which means that if you use that VI, all dashboard data stops. NI knows about it, and it will hopefully be fixed in the next update.

Take a look at the code 1629 posted on the FIRST forums for an example of how to pack the data for sending to the dashboard.

For right now, run in ram, but in the future, use that VI for sending dashboard data.