Laptop "Dashboard"

[KRibordy]

I'm not too skilled at programming GUI's; Visual Basic seemed the easiest for that aspect. However, if Labview has a built in dashboard, that would be able to interface with the robot, correct? Even if they're running different platforms or whatever?

I guess I've got a lot of learning to do between this season and next...

[heydowns]

Originally Posted by KRibordy

I'm not too skilled at programming GUI's; Visual Basic seemed the easiest for that aspect. However, if Labview has a built in dashboard, that would be able to interface with the robot, correct? Even if they're running different platforms or whatever?

I guess I've got a lot of learning to do between this season and next...

Right. As a couple people have said, the Robot just sends Dashboard data over the communications channel along with other things the DS needs to know from the robot. Either of the Robot programming environments (LabVIEW or WindRiver C++) can be used to send Dashboard data in the communications packets. Both environments include example code on how to do this.

I cannot speak for the LabVIEW example, but the WindRiver example doesn't actually send useful information. Rather, it shows you how to send the data.

For the PC side, the KOP-provided version of LabVIEW (with all appropriate updates applied) has an example/template program, which you can customize, that is a GUI Dashboard which runs on a PC connected to the Driver's Station. However, all it does behind the scenes is read the network data, so, as others have suggested, it is quite possible to make a "Dashboard" in other PC-based programming environments.

[GearsOfFury]

LabView gives you access to some very nifty 'front panel' GUI objects and is very easy to hook up to inputs and drive outputs from it. Having these GUI objects for our robot code debugging was one of the big reasons we went with LabView this year. I would consider it at least as easy as Visual Studio in this regard.

The example Dashboard program that comes with the KOP Labview install is super-easy to compile and get running. It tracks all of the PWM, relay, and analog outputs and inputs on the robot, displays the camera view, battery voltage, and more. By default it dumps the 984 bytes of user data to a string in a log window, but you could decode that data however you want to drive your own gages, dials, lights, etc.