Announce: Write your dashboard using HTML/Javascript!

[jtrv]

I'll try it out once I get a chance but that won't be for a decent amount of time. Glad that someone finally made some improvements to Dashboard. It's so painful to use, yet so helpful.

Thanks for your work!

[virtuald]

Originally Posted by jtrv

I'll try it out once I get a chance but that won't be for a decent amount of time. Glad that someone finally made some improvements to Dashboard. It's so painful to use, yet so helpful.

Thanks for your work!

It's worth noting that at the moment the only thing that is really provided is the NetworkTables interface, so it's not *quite* a replacement for SmartDashboard. You'll have to write your own HTML/JS widgets and such -- but this is significantly easier than writing a SmartDashboard widget. I'm hoping over time that pynetworktables2js will be bundled with more and more functions/etc to make it even easier to bind a networktable variable to an HTML button/input/etc.

I'm aware of at least two efforts to create SmartDashboard-like things in HTML/JS, both of which use (or are transitioning to use) pynetworktables2js. Probably by the time next season rolls around they will be even more feature complete.

[virtuald]

Team 1418 has released our UI code today which uses pynetworktables2js, see the attached screenshot. It's functional and quite shiny looking, though the code isn't as polished as I would like. A lot of the HTML work was done by a student who didn't know how to program at all at the beginning of the season, but I think it turned out pretty well and he learned a lot.

https://github.com/frc1418/2015-ui