Smart Dashboard - What do you think?

[pmalmsten]

Thanks for the feedback everyone. I have noted down all of your requests and will implement them when I can. For those of you with FirstForge accounts, feel free to submit bugs tickets (under the "Tracker" tab) or feature requests (under the "Tasks" tab) at the SmartDashboard project page and I will keep track of them.

To clarify a few things that were discussed:

- Maximum number of fields, etc.. Due to the structure of the network code, up to 127 fields may be created. This is not affected by data type. Name strings may be of any length (within reason), but value data of type String are restricted to 127 characters in length.

If you encounter one of these limitations or any other strange behavior, I encourage you to send the return value of SmartDashboard.log() to
SmartDashboard.diagnoseErrorCode(). It will return to a string suggesting what went wrong. A value of SmartDashboard.SUCCESS will be returned when the call succeeds.

- SmartDashboard.init(). Calling this function is now optional; if the SmartDashboard class is not already initialized, it will do so immediately upon the first call to log().

- Widgets are redundantly re-created and their predecessors are orphaned occasionally on a reboot. I noticed this as well earlier today; it is being tracked as a bug.

Thanks for all of your suggestions! A graph widget and logging to a file are very popular requests, so they are my top priority. I will also investigate adding a compass or other "directional" widget and optional "snap to grid" behavior.

Also, if any of you are interested in submitting patches to the client side code, I just posted a zip of the source code Net Beans project. Unfortunately, anonymous version control access is not available on FirstForge, but I would be happy to look at patches.

Feel free to keep posting ideas!
~Paul Malmsten