White Paper Discuss: Team 810's 2004 Dashboard Backend

[Ian W.]

After all my talk about Team 810's C++/Flash MX Dashboard, I'm happy to announce that I've finally finished the C++ part .

There's a few issues with the code that I can't figure out for various reasons:

1) The battery voltage formulas I found did not work, so all you get now is the byte as the Dashboard Port sends it. It's a relative value, but it's better than nothing.

2) It seems that I have an fprint statement that sometimes does not have an opened data stream, I'm not sure where it is, or how to fix it, because it seems to pop up rather randomly. If anyone sees it, please let me know so I can try to fix it.

3) This Dashboard Program is NOT complete! That'd take all the fun out of using it, don't you think ? This white paper only consists of the C++ Backend, so if you need any help changing it or compiling it, just let me know and I'll do whatever I can to help. Just remember, don't download this Thursday morning and expect to have a completely working Dashboard by your first practice match.

4) This white paper only contains the C++ backened, nothing of the Flash MX frontend is here. Mostly that's due to the fact that we haven't even started working on it, and partially because when ours is finished, it will be 100% customized for Team 810's 2004 robot. You WILL have to create your own Flash MX frontend if you wish to use this Dashboard Program as anything other than a console application.

5) I'm not entirely sure that this program plays nicely with the IFI programs, so you may need to reboot your computer a lot during the competitions. I'm trying to figure out how to play nice with the serial port, but I don't know a lot about serial port programming, so if anyone can suggest better solutions than how Rob Bayer did two years ago (look in the programming white papers, that's where I got my serial routines from), that'd be a huge help.

I think that's it, I probably forgot a few things, if I did I'll post them as I remember them.

One last thing, just make sure to read the little clause I put in at the beginning of the .cpp file, I don't want teams to take this and not give back to the community.