Testing SmartDashboard Widgets without a robot

[loafdog]

Hi,
A couple of students on my team are writing extensions for SmartDashboard. They want to work on this at home. I'm looking for a way to test the new extension.

One thing we tried with the VerticalBar tutorial example is making the class extend StaticWidget instead of Widget, change class var to different value(0->50 for example), recompile, copy to jar to extensions folder, add new widget to dash. Now the widget shows half green, half black so you can test colors and that the amount of color is half the widget.
But this is kind of tiring and time consuming.

Is there an 'easy' way to simulate a robot sending updates to the SmartDashboard? Anyone tried something like this?

Thanks.
-Maciej