Custom Dashboard Program Ideas?

[apalrd]

Any attempt at creating a dashboard should reflect the robot, and thus you would either have to write it for last year's robot as a learning experience or wait until you write the robot-end code next year.

I have a tabbed interface that automatically switches between disabled, auto, and teleop, plus some tabs for subsystem debugging. (I included the source code in my recent CD-paper of my 2010 robot code). The camera view is not used by the drivers, but the coach can see if there are hidden balls. We never look at the dashboard, except the camera image, unless something is wrong and we need feedback information NOW. We also have an indicator of which autonomous program will run when enabled, so the operator can set it from her controls before the beginning of the match. We tried placing a yellow circle where the target should be for 3rd zone auto to assist with line up since we run 3rd zone basically all the time, but then the camera got hit by a ball and un-aligned.


You cannot send data back to the robot. Dashboard packets are one-way, going from the user code on the cRio to the dashboard application on the Classmate, but not back.

If you are planning on using the Dashboard for debugging (And are using LabVIEW), you can just put controls on your VI's (any of them) and adjust them at runtime, if you run Robot Main.vi instead of doing a full build. You can probe wires, look at graphs, and edit tuning constants in real time. When you are done, you can (after stopping execution of robot main) right-click on the control and say "Data Operations -> Make Current value default" to save it, even when you do a full build.

[Dkt01]

tutkows1:
I need to clarify. We didn't actually measure the air pressure. We just used the same sensor the air compressor uses to determine full vs. not full. If I remember right, the sensor was already one of our digital inputs, so we made a boolean indicator on the dashboard.

[tutkows1]

@DKt01
Oh, i has hoping you could help me in the quest to find one for a personal project.

I like the tabs for debugging.

[Alan Anderson]

Originally Posted by apalrd

...plus some tabs for subsystem debugging.

This can be crucial. Having the ability to put the raw sensor values on screen is an important part of defensive programming. If the robot is misbehaving, it's nice to be able to quickly pinpoint a disconnected gyro or limit switch.

There were ideas for an additional tab that we never got around to implementing: a "preflight checklist" with appropriate indicators.