LabView DriverStation & Dashboard w/ Driver Account

[java4first]

A quick (panicked) question ... we got a different laptop to use this year instead of the Classmate (because of larger screen real estate more than anything else), and spent time getting a wonderful (to us ;-) custom dashboard built in LabView that takes up the whole screen, with space for the standard DriverStation to overlay it sitting in the middle at the bottom. So far, so good. It is running Windows 7 as delivered by HP if this makes a difference.

Then, at the practice day at the regionals yesterday, we ran into the problem with having to run as "Driver" (and, thanks to Windows notion of user accounts, just renaming an existing one to be "Driver" of course doesn't work). After getting that fixed, we had the following unfortunate situation occur:

As soon as you run as Driver account, when you launch the DriverStation, it comes up pegged to the lower left corner of the display, and no longer has the window mananger title bar and ability to reposition it.

Worse - the custom Dashboard we built comes up also tied to the lower left corner of the display, although tiled above the DriverStation (it also has no window manager title bar) ... and is clipped in the horizontal and vertical direction at what appears to be the size of a Classmate display.

So, my question is - is there some feature of the two applications that looks at which account is running the code, and when it sees "Driver" it says - oh, you are running on a Classmate and we need to fix / hardcode how it displays.

Assuming this is true, is there someway to fix it (at least for the custom dashboard ... like a registry setting or something in the code that gets generated by the example dashboard project that we started with in order to get all of our additional stuff added to)? Or tell me what we are othewise doing wrong here? Or does one need to write a custom dashboard in something else (like Java and Swing) in order to be able to use / take advantage of the larger screen real estate?

Thanks in advance!
Stu

[Vikesrock]

There is a case structure at the bottom of the default dashboard code that handles it's sizing and placement when it sees it is in the drive account. It sounds like this code may have been left in your custom dashboard.

[java4first]

Thank you very much for such a prompt reply. We'll have to see if we can figure it out (I'm a Java programmer, and we've struggled with the graphical nature of the LabView programming for the dashboard ... but I think we should be able to find it based on what you said). Thank you again!

[Vikesrock]

Originally Posted by java4first

Thank you very much for such a prompt reply. We'll have to see if we can figure it out (I'm a Java programmer, and we've struggled with the graphical nature of the LabView programming for the dashboard ... but I think we should be able to find it based on what you said). Thank you again!

I have attached a picture of what you are looking for.

If you still want the dashboard stuck to the bottom left, but just want to change the displayed size, you can do so using the numbers inside the case structure. The '200' is to leave space for the Driver Station, you should probably leave that alone. The 600 is the height of the top of the dashboard from the bottom of the screen (meaning your dashboard height is that number - 200). If you want your dashboard to take up all available vertical space, you should be able to remove the subtraction and wire the second parameter from the left cluster straight across to the second right, just like the first one is done. The 1024 is the width of the dashboard.

If you want to unstick it and allow for moving and resizing I believe removing that whole chunk of code will do that, but I'm not positive on that.

[gnunes]

The picture Vikesrock sent has all the crucial info. In the case structure, they are setting the bounds of the Dashboard panel. The upper left corner of the screen is (0,0) and you can work it out from there.

Below that is a Property Node for the Dashboard VI. You can see that the closeable, minimizable, and "has title bars" properties have all been set to false. You can change that, and then the running program will have a title bar and be possible to re-position. If you click on one of these properties with the hand (operate tool), you will get a pop-up list of all the properties of the VI. There are lots. You could, for example, allow scroll bars, which it doesn't have by default. Not useful in competition, but I put information "off screen" for debugging that I could scroll to. Grab the handle on the bottom of the Property Node to stretch it down and add more connections. You can then set each connection to be the property you want. (By default, it will be the next property in the list after the one above it already showing.)

The Driver Station you cannot change. We don't have access to the source code, so we can't move it or change it's size. It will always take up the bottom 200 pixels of your screen and always only be 1024 pixels wide.