Wire Protocol / ICD for Robot to Driver Laptop?

[Greg McKaskle]

My advice is to use the smart dashboard or network tables protocol.

The low-level stuff you mention was a stop-gap protocol that sent serialized string buffers between robot and dashboard as payload of the UDP traffic. It still exists and you are welcome to use it, but it is low level and not an ideal candidate for multi language communications. It was pretty easy to use for LV since it was the LV serialized data format being used. So your teammate most likely just had a datatype defined and did the flatten and unflatten of the data. On the C or Java side, they would have needed to construct a buffer using the class for the serial data. Going between Java and C, there is absolutely no need to use the LV data format. If you are capable of it, you can use your own data format that the robot writes into the buffer and your C code reads out.

But again, that is a decent amount of work compared to using networkTables.

Greg McKaskle