So, I’ve got the stateful autonomous setup and running (love how easy it was, by the way). When I sim the robot in pyfrc, the options all show up in the drop down.
However, when I throw the code on the bot, I have no idea where to look to find the chooser? We’re on the vanilla drivers station, direct from the 2016 image.
Any suggestions for a rookie team who is really feeling the end of build season?
Which dashboard are you using? There are several options, but the Java Smartdashboard is the one we are using. It just shows up on the dashboard after you initialize it in the code. To install it you will need Eclipse and the wpilib addons that go with that. Here is a good resource for getting this all set up https://wpilib.screenstepslive.com/s/4485/m/26401
As I read a bit more, I notice some other code examples showing that you need some code on the drivers station…
Where would I put that? Our experience with the drivers station so far is turning it on when we want to drive, making sure we’re enabled, teleop, etc, and using it to make sure our USB mappings are correct…
I’m using the Dashboard that came pre-installed on the Classmate. The title bar states “FRC PC Dashboard”.
Is that a different dashboard?
Yeah, it is different. The built in one is LabView based, I believe and the Java SmartDashboard allows for a ton of customization like adding an auton chooser.
Well, that’ll be the first thing to check then. Thanks so much!
The LabVIEW version allows for the same customization. You can do what ever you want to do.
You shouldn’t need to put any code on DS. If you use eclipse then get the wpilib plugin (instructions found here)
Run smartdashboard from the wpilib menu bar and connect to roborio-XXXX-frc.local (XXXX is team #). In the Autonomous Mode folder you need to add the key “selected” and make the value the MODE_NAME of the mode you want to run.
The short answer is that which was said above: get SmartDashboard running (which I think you can select in the DS if you set it to “Java Dashboard”) and the autonomous chooser will just show up. However, customizing SmartDashboard and (in particular) making it pretty is fairly annoying.
With that in mind, I’ll give you another option: pynetworktables2js
It makes building a dashboard and interacting with the robot as easy as making a webpage! The example program has an ‘autonomous.html’ page that shows a combo box which lets you choose autonomous modes.
You will not be able to communicate with python programs from the LabVIEW dashboard via NetworkTables, as the LabVIEW dashboard is not backwards compatible with NT2 clients, and we haven’t upgraded pynetworktables to NT3 yet.