SmartDashboard Startup

[Brian Selle]

Two SmartDashboard questions:

1) When I start the FRC Driver Station, the SmartDashboard automatically starts up without window decoration (titlebar, close button, etc). Can I change this behavior to include the window decoration? I believe it's starting up from Program Files/FRC Dashboard/Dashboard.exe. Double clicking on the SmartDashboard jar file includes the decorations and works fine.

2) What is triggering the SmartDashboard to start up with the FRC Driver Station?

[Brian Selle]

Figured out question #2...

In the file 'Documents\FRC\FRC DS Data Storage.ini' there is an entry

DashboardCmdLine = ""C:\\Program Files (x86)\\FRC Dashboard\\Dashboard.exe""

You can change this to use the NIDashboard or the SmartDashboard (Dashboard.exe).

[Brian Selle]

Figured out question #1...

In the file 'C:\Program Files\FRC Dashboard\Launcher.bat' there is a statement that launches the SmartDashboard executable jar file:

cd "C:\Program Files\SmartDashboard"
java -jar SmartDashboard.jar competition

Remove 'competition' and the window decorations will show up.

This was a bit twisted because I have a 64-bit machine and the files are stored in several places. So here are the steps as far as I can tell:

1) run FRC Driver Station
2) it loads 'Documents\FRC\FRC DS Data Storage.ini'
3) which has a property called DashboardCmdLine to tell it what dashboard exe to run
4) if you have installed SmartDashboard it will be set to 'Program Files/FRC Dashboard/Dashboard.exe'
5) which calls 'Launcher.bat' to light off the SmartDashboard.