Virtual Driver Station

[byteit101]

Cool! this will be nice if we blow another ds!
Could I have the source? this would be really useful. Also, can you plug in a flashdrive, and update firmware? THAT, would be Awesome!

[Kingofl337]

This is a great tool, I can't wait till the joysticks selection feature is released.

I'm very surprised that FIRST did not release a softDS instead of giving them out to 1500 teams. It would have been allot cheaper for them, they could have just had driver stations with the field and had USB breakout that uses HID.

EDIT: Having played with this a for about 2 hours tonight I would like to upgrade this from great to AWESOME!

The only thing it needs is the Joystick Selection and Feedback for DS Outputs.

[Gary Bonner]

This sounds like just what we need. We have two cRIOs and only one driver station. We are planning on using the second cRIO for demonstrations at our upcoming regional and the DS will be occupied.

Can a Labview front panel be running and displaying data in another window while the virtual driver station is running?

[Dave Flowerday]

OK, I've got the next version ready for anyone who wants to try it out. It's a pretty big change over the previous one. Here's the features I've added:
- GUI to set DS digital inputs
- GUI sliders to set value of DS analog inputs
- Display of DS digital outputs
- Prompt for team # at startup so you don't need to provide it as a
program argument (previous value remembered)
- Map real joysticks to DS USB ports
- Labels for DS inputs/outputs that are saved

It's available here:
http://www.pier13.com/projects/frc/virtualds/

Check it out and let me know what you think. I added another safety feature which is that the mouse must remain on top of the window or the robot will be disabled. This may be a bit too paranoid (and can be annoying), but without that feature it's possible to click in another window and give it focus, and then the spacebar and/or ESC key no longer works to quickly disable the robot. Additionally, I had to change the key to change LCD screens from TAB to F1, and the reboot command is temporarily disabled.

There are labels for each of the digital inputs and outpus which can be edited. These will be saved when the program exits. Additionally, the team # that you are prompted for at startup will be saved as well.

Attached is a screenshot that shows the new version.

Originally Posted by Gary Bonner

Can a Labview front panel be running and displaying data in another window while the virtual driver station is running?

We don't use Labview so I can't say for sure, but I don't see why not. When you say "front panel" is that the Dashboard or some other Labview thing? The catch with the Dashboard is that you need to set your computer's IP address to the address the DS would use (10.xx.yy.5), and the dashboard data is sent to 10.xx.yy.6. A revision to come soon will allow you to override the dashboard and robot IP addresses to help with this problem. In the meantime if you know what you're doing you can add the Dashboard IP address to your Ethernet network adapter in Windows (so it will have 2 address, 10.xx.yy.5 and 10.xx.yy.6) which should make it work.

[Gary Bonner]

The front panel is like a user interface; you can both view data from the cRIO as well as provide input. Others can describe it better. For our purposes, the virtual driver station would have to lose focus, so we'll try using two laptops.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Gary Bonner

The front panel is like a user interface; you can both view data from the cRIO as well as provide input. Others can describe it better. For our purposes, the virtual driver station would have to lose focus, so we'll try using two laptops.

I might add a menu option to turn that focus 'feature' off for things like that too.

[byteit101]

nice update!
could you add clicking the select button switches between modes and clicking the teleop auto button switches that?
also, could you send me the code?

[Kingofl337]

I haven't tried the new version on my robot yet, but after load and team number entry the display shows Team 0000. I also noticed the "feature" about having another application create no responce to the space bar. As, much as having the mouse over the application to allow it to enable is bothersome its much safer. I do not think you should allow for a bypass of this feature.

Virtual DS 2010!

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Kingofl337

I haven't tried the new version on my robot yet, but after load and team number entry the display shows Team 0000.

This is normal - I use the team number that comes back from the robot, so if you're not connected you'll get 0000. Also, it won't let you enable or go into autonomous unless it's receiving valid packets from the robot.

For anyone who's using the program, I posted a new version to fix a small bug with the analog values that I discovered when I was able to test with our robot tonight.

[Gary Bonner]

Last night I tried out the original version of the virtual driver station, which doesn’t have the mouse over feature, with an open front panel. Everything worked great. This is exactly what we needed. The demos we’ll be running with it are not on a robot, and are inactive except while a button is pressed, so a disable is more or less built into them.

Thanks.

[Kingofl337]

I found two bugs in the .5 version of the Virtual DS software. After detecting my robot it displayed the team number as 0111!? When I plugged in a Logitech Dual Action GamePad and started the software it gave an error and would not detect the game pad.

I was running the software from My Desktop on Vista Premium

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Kingofl337

I found two bugs in the .5 version of the Virtual DS software. After detecting my robot it displayed the team number as 0111!?

Yup, oops, sorry about that. Fixed. Incidentally, I created a cRIO simulator and I did test it with different team numbers, but now realized that my simulator didn't verify the correct team number was being received . Good catch.

When I plugged in a Logitech Dual Action GamePad and started the software it gave an error and would not detect the game pad.

Yeah, I saw this on Thursday night when another mentor fired it up on his Vista laptop (I only have XP machines and it doesn't happen on those). It's not a defect in my code - it's in the wxWidgets library that's used. I'll need to look into how to fix it. However, it doesn't prevent it from working. It actually detects the joystick just fine, it just can't read the name of the stick. So, in the joysticks dropdown you'll see a blank line, which is your joystick. Not ideal but at least it works. I also need to confirm if this happens with all joystick types or just Logitech.

Additionally, I reworked the application focus safety feature. Now, it can detect the spacebar or ESC key even when the VirtualDS does not have focus. So, it no longer disables the robot when you move the mouse out of the window. This is quite an improvement I think. Now, if you go to another window, as soon as you hit space or ESC it will still disable the robot. The downside is it disables any time spacebar is hit - even if you're filling in one of the label fields in the DS. This is a good thing I think, but a little quirky.

New version here:
http://www.pier13.com/projects/frc/virtualds/

[Tom Bottiglieri]

This tool has been super useful to us. We killed our DS at the regional and still haven't gotten a replacement. Thanks.

We've put a bunch of software dev and drive hours on the vDS, and everything seems to run smoothly.

There is one issue where after a while of use, the robot will switch between enabled and disabled mode (at least on the UI) at about 5Hz. We have to reboot the cRIO to fix it.

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by Tom Bottiglieri

This tool has been super useful to us. We killed our DS at the regional and still haven't gotten a replacement. Thanks.

We've put a bunch of software dev and drive hours on the vDS, and everything seems to run smoothly.

I'm really glad to hear that it has been working for you. I have been curious if anyone was actually using it

There is one issue where after a while of use, the robot will switch between enabled and disabled mode (at least on the UI) at about 5Hz. We have to reboot the cRIO to fix it.

Interesting. I'll have to see if I can get some extended time with our robot to attempt to reproduce this.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Would it be possible for this to talk to FMS Light? We are doing some tricky things with some hard timed loop, and I want to make sure our code will run in a competition environment. I am 99% sure it will be fine, but Murphy can always find that 1%.

If not, would it be possible to add controls to the GUI select alliance color? We pull that data from the DS object in WPILib. Right now the vDS returns kRed.