Sending Data from Custom Dashboard

[duffany1]

I'm sure this question has been asked about a million times but ...

Our team programmed our own custom dashboard using LabVIEW, basically it just has two camera displays for the two Axis cameras on our robot.

However, I want to add a bunch of boolean switches and some numeric inputs to our dashboard so that we can select which autonomous program we want to run, set a delay for the robot's autonomous mode, etc. This means that I will have to send data to the cRIO from the dashboard.

I know it's probably possible to do this with a UDP connection. However, I'm wondering if there's an easier way to do it, because I recall seeing some boolean switches on the default dashboard that is provided every year, and I'm wondering if I can do it in a similar manner. I also saw that there was an FRC dashboard tutorial but that seemed to pertain only to getting data from the robot, as opposed to sending data to the robot, which is what I hope to accomplish.

In any case, how do I go about doing this?

In case anyone is wondering, we always went about accomplishing this sort of thing by means of a shoddy switchbox on our robot, and if we wanted a delay in the autonomous program --- forget it, we'd have to redeploy the code in the heat of competition.

[Mark McLeod]

The easiest way, by far, is to use the existing capabilities built into the Driver Station app.
On the I/O tab, without a Cypress connected, all the switches are usable and can even be re-named.
They all are already available in your robot's code.

Adding a simple UDP send/receive would be one typical path to get data from the Dashboard to the robot.
Another would be to investigate the LabVIEW network tables, a late addition to the FRC LabVIEW source forge project.

[duffany1]

Thanks for the help! I will probably just wind up using the DS inputs. I'll check out those network tables in my spare time though, it definitely seems interesting.