Our team has a rather small DS laptop, and we attempt to display robot/match information on the SmartDashboard. Our drive team, however, is unable to actually look because it breaks their focus and is easily forgettable. In addition, there is information that we’d like to keep track of that would be made easier by some driver station functionality. I’m looking for clever ways to display key info to the drivers and coach in a easy to see way.
So I was just wondering: in general and specifically with Steamworks, what information did you show your drive team (using the driver station) and how did you go about displaying it?
Often times, in my experience, looking at data like that falls to the drive coach as the drivers (like you said) are too focused. Things like sounds often get drowned out in the chaos so I highly suggest collored lights that come on when a condition is true. We had two green lights on our dashboard last year for our operator to tell when the shooter wheels were up to a good speed. If they were both green you were good to fire. You could also do this via a USB LED as to avoid taking up space.
I have also found that sometimes less information is better as it takes time to concider all the information, and in comp a moment is extremely valuble. Try keeping it to only what you need else it may actually slow you down.
We used an LED strip attached to the back of our gear holder to tell the drivers how much they were on the peg. In previous years, we’ve also had a camera to the driver station. (including a bootleg vision tracking solution in 2016)
In Stronghold we put a 4" X 4" green light on the screen to indicate when a ball was present. We had the issue where they couldn’t see when they had picked up a ball.
Course with the hidden field from this year we also had a 2nd 24" monitor with a 180 view from one side of the robot and another regular view from the otherside.
I have lots of theories on what works best, but it really depends on the drive team.
The best way is to change LED lights on the robot to indicate different things. The drive team is already looking at the robot, best to not take their eyes away from that.
Similarly, vibration in XBOX controllers or similar is another great way to indicate status/state of robot.
If neither of these two will work, you can put something in smartdashboard or a custom website or whatever you like.
When designing easy-to-read displays, a couple design paradigms to remember:
–Dark-means-normal - Don’t turn on a light or make something blinky unless it actually requires attention. All lights off means things are normal. We used four levels of severity in our indicators:
Green = Good, but not-default operating condition (ex: Shooter ready)
Yellow = Bad condition which should resolve itself soon (ex: drivetrain current limiting active)
Red = Bad condition which will not resolve itself (ex: Pneumatic Pressure Low - for us, below 20PSI means something is leaking bad)
Blinky Red = Bad condition which is preventing the driver from doing what they want (Ex: Vision coprocessor offline, cannot align robot like you’re requesting).
–Don’t read numbers - We also provided a dial for shooter speed. Although it’s nice to have the actual number there for debugging, it takes too long to actually read a number and think to yourself “is this an acceptable value?”. Better to do something like change the color of the number to green when good, red when bad… Or if you have a dial, put green & red markings to show where the “good” zone is. The key is to be able to tell “at a glance”, without reading a number, is the value good or not.
–Use all available space. The bigger the indicator, the better. High contrast is good for quick reading.
The dashboard interface needs to be simple with large icons. To get it in our field of vision, we use a computer monitor on a mount. Seems to work well.
To aid in getting the laptop screen closer to our drivers’ eyes, we used a DJ laptop stand. You can find these for decently cheap on amazon, but the concept is simple enough to fabricate in-house. Instead of the drivers having to look down and to the side to see the screen, this allowed them to just glance to the side slightly. It’s been fairly helpful through our 2016 offseason events and 2017 official events.
Specifically for 2017, we needed to display a live feed from the front of our robot as well as an indicator for gear possession.
While this may not work in all situations. Something our team has found to work very well is to use haptic feedback from the controllers (We use the Xbox 360 controllers). This is great for knowing information very quickly while being able to keep looking at the robot. It doesn’t work well for anything that isn’t t true or false like ; shooter speed or current draw. But it works great for; gear in pickup or peg through gear.
As the driver for my team I would like to reiterate the idea that a couple of big, visible icons is more important than having all of the information available. This year for example we just had a couple of large indicators that would change color if we had a gear or had the peg all the way through the gear. I am sure your driver will agree with me when I say that it is really hard to focus on anything except the robot. Maybe next year we will have LEDs on the robot with information, as I think that’s the ideal solution.
We don’t ever want our driver to look away from the robot. Any feed back he needs must be displayed on the robot. We use LED’s. Operator has a camera feed and can take the time to read values on dashboard. This off-season we plan on building up a fancy smart dashboard. But our driver will not be looking at it. Unless we do some fancy HUD with a holo lens or another AR alternative.
I noticed, from afar, that 254 had a small secondary display on their driver station. Could someone from the poofs comment on what information that displayed and how it was used?
I think I’ve seen something before where a team has projected an image onto the polycarbonate which would act as a king of AR. Kind of like what some cars have with displaying the speed on the windshield. I’ll have to do some experimenting with it, but it would be cool to have for next season.
Over the past several teams I have been on, we’ve implemented code on the driver station PC (typically java) that takes messages over Network Tables and plays sounds on the PC based code running on the RoboRIO.
Sound feedback is a great way to let the drivers know what is going on without having to have them take their eyes off the robot/field.
I will see if I can get the coding team to publish the code to do this.
Highly recommended. This should be a standard feature of the driver station in my opinion.
I the years I’ve been doing it, I have never heard of an alliance partner complaining. It is incredibly loud behind the glass. If our drivers were not used to listening for the “vision system locked” sound (for example) from practicing with the sound system on in our high school, I am not sure THEY would even hear the sounds.
I had the same idea at the beginning of this season, but kind of taken to another level. I was thinking of having a headphone/microphone system between the drivers and drive coach. Basically everyone wears headphones with attached mics, and the voices of each person are transmitted to the others as well. Sounds representing certain actions would also get played over the network as well. The only issue I see with the legality of it is that the drive coach isn’t allowed to touch the operator console during the match, as well as the fact that you might want your drive team to hear what else is going on around them.