What is the easiest way to create a custom driverstation dashboard?

[feverittm]

Java folks,

I have been around FRC as a mentor now for two seasons and have seen a number of really good and inventive dashboards on team's driver's stations. While not a requirement for competition, they can be an advantage if developed well from a systematic point of view.

Now to my real question. From what I have seen of the custom dashboard development flow, the new dashboard is created in labview with the controls added and connected to a special 'dashboard' datatype that packages/unpackages the dashboard information that goes between the robot and the driver's station.

This packed datatype seems very hard to manage and is the main reason that we have not tried to develop our own dashboard. Our mentors have the necessary Labview experience to understand the mechanics of the remainder of the labview development, but the datatype seems too clunky.

Is there an easier was to manage this datatype? If your robot is programmed in labview then this seems to be very straightforward, while using other languages it seems much more difficult.

Anyone have a good java workflow for dashboard development they would like to share?

Enjoy!