Labview dashboard vs SmartDashboard with Java

[F22Rapture]

From what I've seen, the LabView dashboard has more customizability and frankly looks better, however, SmartDashboard interfaces better with the Java code. Which do you use and why?

[Ziv]

We used Java for the robot and LabVIEW for the dashboard. We had experience making LabVIEW dashboards and no experience with writing widgets for SmartDashboard, so when we decided we needed a display for the drivers we used the tools we knew. It was very effective and not difficult to implement.

An example of sending data from a Java robot to a LabVIEW dashboard is in our 2012 code. (The LabVIEW side isn't uploaded, but PM me if you'd like a look.) If you're interested in sending data back to the robot from LabVIEW, check out this thread.

[connor.worley]

This season we used the SmartDashboard for graphing our shooter speed to tune our control loop. However, we disabled it during competitive because of stability issues (NetworkTables crash) we found in testing.