Enabling Default Dashboard in C++

[slavik262]

Originally Posted by Dave Scheck

So, to dig deeper, lets look at the internals of sendIOPortData(). The first thing it does is get a reference to the low priority dashboard packer. The packer contains the data that will be pushed onto the bit stream. My understanding that the low and high priority packers don't actually have different priorities in the data stream itself. On the receiver side, if the buffer is too large, the low priority packet is truncated.

This is correct. The UDP datagrams sent from the robot are a fixed size (1018 bytes IIRC). After the header, high-priority data is packed, followed by error strings, then by low-priority data. The low-priority data is truncated to the packet size minus eight bytes. The last eight bytes contain four bytes of padding (bytes with a value of 0) and a CRC 32-bit checksum (for error detection).

[mikets]

I haven't looked into the dashboard stuff in depth but I have a few questions myself. Is the dashboard application customizable? If so, how do I customize it? Is the source code to the dashboard application available? My understanding is that the dashboard application is expecting data packet stream of a certain format. So if I customize the data packer for a different format, I need to change the dashboard application correspondingly. In addition, I would like to customize the dashboard application with different controls, lights, knobs and graphs. I am trying to change dashboard application into a diagnostic tool.
Thanks.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by mikets

I haven't looked into the dashboard stuff in depth but I have a few questions myself. Is the dashboard application customizable? If so, how do I customize it? Is the source code to the dashboard application available?

The default dashboard is a LabVIEW application. You can create a new Dashboard project from the LabVIEW starting screen. You have full control over what it looks like and how it works.

If you don't already use LabVIEW, it will be a bit of a learning curve for you, but it's not particularly difficult.

[Dave Scheck]

To build on what Alan said, open up the dashboard example projects on both the Labview and C++ side. The packet that's filled in on the C++ side maps to the pink cluster on the left side of the Labview diagram. As long as you get them to match, you can change them to whatever you want. The next thing to do is to trace the pink line coming out of the data type. It leads to a block that converts the binary stream into data of that type. The output of that block is a cluster that you can use the unbundle by name block to get the data. My suggestion is to find where the unbundles are in the example and replace them with logic controls of your own. Once you get the hang of it and come up with a good way of packing your data, it's pretty easy.