Making Debugging Easier

[dm0ney]

I've had several ideas to make debugging easier on us programmers or even just checking out the robot between matches.

Currently we have an autonomous selector switch on our robot. I inserted a special 'debug mode' that we can put any autonomous sequence in and test it and when we run out of time and cant reload code, its not a big deal.
Stemming off that, I was wondering what other ideas or solutions fellow programmers have had?

My next change to our code once the 'No Work' period is ended for our team (Nationals) is going to use a toggle switch on our OI to enable or disable printfs for pots and encoders. Those two are by far the two most used printfs on our team, so I hope to make it easier for us programmers to work.

Also, has any team used the Dashboard to read pot or encoder values? That was going to be another project on the horizon which I believe is exempt from the 'No Work' period because its not actual work on the robot.
Currently we use the dashboard to trim joysticks, although we did use it to monitor pwms before we got our robot to test code.

A few ideas in the works for later this year or next year are:

Three Pots that can plug into the OI and be used to tweak PID gains rapidly.
Utilizing the leds on the OI we have to enable us to deadband joysticks sans dashboard
Mini Dashboard viewer instead of a laptop (possibly pocketpc or the like)
Wireless programmer for use in those few hours programmers actually get the robot right before shipping it away.
???

These are all ideas which we have YET to get working but please add what programming easter eggs you have put into the code to make your life easier.


EDIT:
Dashbord Config of pots and encoders in although since only 4 digits, I have a call that looks somethin like this for encoders:

User_ByteX = (int) abs( (int) Get_Encoder_Counts(LEFT)) % 1000;

Trim joysticks done sans laptop using the userbytes so dashboard or OI itself, still working on a more compact dashboard display.