Dashboard

[Tom Bottiglieri]

yeah i would also find that very helpful. I am not going to make a dashboard program this year, but it would be nice if i could figure out how to code this all in vb.

[Nick Fury]

Thanks for doing that then. I was hoping someone would release something on making daskboards.

As for the code being specific to your robot, I knew that it was and by asking you to give code out I wasn't aiming to just plug it in and make it work for my team's bot. I was merely trying to look at code to see how I could perhaps do similar stuff for my team's bot.

I like the idea of releasing a white paper and I hope you do, it would be very beneficial and much appreciated.

[KevinB]

We found our positioning system to be accurate enough to be benefitial. Sure, there are some problems due to wheel slippage and climbing the center structure, but all in all -- it works well.

[Ryan M.]

Originally Posted by Nick Fury

...Yeah, I'm one of those crazy open source hippies....

I am not a hippie.

I'm more of an extremist.

[Kevin Karan]

Originally Posted by Texan

I am not a hippie.

I'm more of an extremist.

eh, yea, I hear ya. One of the main things thats holding me back though is the other programmer on my team is very (very very very) anti-open source. Please dont rush me though. I WILL release the code and a white paper, but I want to make sure its well optomized and well documented, plus im a full time student.

[Ian W.]

Originally Posted by jacob_dilles

yeah but thats kinda skech... think refresh rate at least 15 times a second. i would think VB would be best here, but c++ is a lot more direct in accessing ports.

That was my concern with reading/writing a file at first as well, but it actually worked fairly well.

The one problem with this method that I ran into was when trying to multiplex data. I was unable to create any useful data from multiplexed bits last year, although I'm not sure why. I've been working on the revamping the program for this year, and I think I'm having similar problems, although I'm not entirely sure. I need some more time to work with it.

Another solution is to use ports. I don't know how this works, but a computer scientist who helps us mentioned it as another way, but I never tried using them. C++ has many classes that let you use ports very easily, and apparently Flash MX has stuff to read data on certain ports, but I've never used this.

If you have any questions, I can send you the code from last year, but it's not polished or neat, but it shows how we got the job done. The Flash MX frontend I can't give you, I'm afraid, as it would not help you. It was written specifically for our robot, and I'm not sure how much use it'd be for you. Talk to SuperDan if you have any questions on the Flash MX part though, that was his job.

[jacob_dilles]

does anyone know anything about accesing ram in flash? i know you can do it in C++... so like instead of writing to a file which has got to be bad; i dont know why its just badl; you just share a couple of bytes in ram. the flash could call the c++.

trying to thing of a way to get around the file I/O

[Astronouth7303]

I would apreciate just a zip of the version you showed us and us adapting it. No sense in reinventing the wheel. Of course, I wish that IFI would just relaease source code for both IFI_Loader and Dashboard, since they're both VB.

[Frizle]

how exactly does the dashboard port work anyway?
the data sheet from first says some thing about interlaced data frames
how in vb would you read the data?

[seanwitte]

I uploaded a blank VB template application and our customized 2004 dashboard in the whitepapers section. The blank app has all of the backend plumbing set up to read and process the data from the dashboard port. All you need to do is add GUI elements to display the stuff you want to see, and edit ShowDataFrame1(), ShowDataFrame2(), and ShowDataFrame3(). Those three subs are called when a frame of that type is ready. If you do anything really cool show me at Richmond or Annapolis.

[Frizle]

wow man that is a really nice looking interface
i wish i could do some thing that nice
by the way how do you get the way points from the program in to the robot?
thanks for the help

[Astronouth7303]

Use the MSCOMM control set to Binary mode (as opposed to text). Unfortunately, the only way to have a developer's liscense for it is to get an Enteprise Edition, which may not be accessable.

[seanwitte]

Originally Posted by Frizle

wow man that is a really nice looking interface
i wish i could do some thing that nice
by the way how do you get the way points from the program in to the robot?
thanks for the help

I haven't had a chance to add the rest of the data structure for the waypoints, so for now we're only using it as a reference. When we tell the robot to drive to a waypoint there are several options. It can drive forward or reverse, it can stop at the waypoint or drive through it, etc. We also want to control some actuators on the robot so theres more to it than just following waypoints. We have a finite state machine that defines each step in a behavior. The code isn't generated automatically, yet, so we just use the plotted waypoints as a guide.

[Ian W.]

Originally Posted by jacob_dilles

does anyone know anything about accesing ram in flash? i know you can do it in C++... so like instead of writing to a file which has got to be bad; i dont know why its just badl; you just share a couple of bytes in ram. the flash could call the c++.

trying to thing of a way to get around the file I/O

I don't think it's possible to access RAM in Flash, it just doesn't make sense for it to have that capability. It may be able to read TCP ports though, in which case you can (I think) easily pipe the data through an obscure TCP port that no one else would be using. I'll look into that over the next few days.

[Ryan M.]

Flash can't do things like that. It is for animations and web sites, not actual programs.