How would one go about making custom push buttons for the driver? We are making buttons for set positions for our arm and we need to make 9 buttons that we can read in labview. I know its been done but i cant find anything on it. Help?
You’ll most likely want to look at using the Cypress board. It has a number of digital inputs that would be perfect for what you’re doing here. I’m not so sure on how to program it, as I’m not a coder myself, but I can tell you it’s really easy to wire and set up with the driver station, and our programmer has told me that the programming for it is quite simple. If I recall it should have a disc with it that should help with coding for it. I also seem to remember being told that the driver station sees the digital inputs by default anyway, and I think he was simply programming in Labview for the inputs the computer was recognizing as coming from the board
Programming the Cypress IO module is even easier than that. Don’t use the disk it came with, follow the instructions here.
I was looking how to set this up for my team recently, so if you need any help programming or wiring it, feel free to ask me and I’ll try to help anyway I can
We (1708) were looking for an easy solution to the same problem to implement during this week’s DC regional. Here’s what we came up with:
A USB num pad (example)
This software that allows mapping of keystrokes to a virtual joystick device.
Convenient 3x3 button pattern (with additional buttons for controlling grippers, etc). No wiring required. Optionally, add colored electrical tape and marker annotations to make it pretty.
–Ryan
Using the numpad was suggested by one of my team mates, just didnt want to deal with keypress events and didnt know how to in labview. I know how to do it all in C languages where i do C# for a living.
Team 1985 took apart a USB Logitech controller and wired buttons to the small board the controller is made with and made a control panel with those. The driver station just reads it as the controller.
If you really want to look boss, get some real arcade buttons: http://www.happcontrols.com/pushbuttons/pushbuttons.htm 
You could just wire them up to the terminals of a cheapo usb gamepad (ebay).
The fastest way to do this without buying any extra stuff is to take your switches, wire one pole to ground and the other to a signal pin on the Cypress (I’d definitely suggest the andymark/estop robotics cypress carrier/enclosure!) Then just use the “get compatibility IO digital inputs” function in labview and out come your buttons. Keep in mind they may be reversed (TRUE meaning not pressed).