This year we’ve forked SmartDashboard modded it to introduce things like customization, new components and bug fixes. Instead of writing an extension, I went ahead and directly modified the source code and recompiled it. Since some of the things we introduced are sort of important for robot operation, we would like to use this modded version of SmartDashboard in actual matches. Are there any rules/regulations prohibiting this?
Nice idea, I would have tried that too if I could have but it appears to be prohibited in the game manual on page 89, R73. The DRIVER Station software, roboRIO, Power Distribution Panel, Pneumatics Control Modules,
Voltage Regulator Modules, RSL, 120A breaker, motor controllers, relay modules (per R36-B),
Wireless Bridge, and batteries shall not be tampered with, modified, or adjusted in any way
(tampering includes drilling, cutting, machining, rewiring, disassembling, painting, etc.), with the
following exceptions:
I saw that too and that’s why I’m worried. I don’t know whether or not SmartDashboard is DS software. On one side, you can say it’s somewhat standardized and can be used to control the robot. On the other hand, many teams have written extensions for it, it’s open source software and it’s provided by WPI rather than NI or FIRST…
The blue box says:
Please note that the DRIVERStation application is a separate application from the Dashboard. The DRIVERStation software may not be modified, while teams are expected to customize their Dashboard code.
Do you have other bug fixes besides https://github.com/wpilibsuite/SmartDashboard/pull/121?
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I do have other modifications, although they’re not bug fixes. I’ve added numerous other features and customizations.
Any particular reason why you didn’t use Shuffleboard, SmartDashboard’s customizable and extensible replacement? To my knowledge SmarrDashboard support may even be removed in the future.
We used a heavily customized fork of Shuffleboard last year, and are planning on using it again this year. We have had no issues, and I’d be very, very surprised if anyone would considered it a violation of the rules, considering many teams use their own custom dashboards.
You can absolutely recompile dashboard and use them. In fact, you are not required to use anything WPILib on the robot side either. You do have to use the low level netcomm and FPGA libraries, but everything above that can be 100% modified. There are no restrictions in terms of the rules. And since all of WPILib’s tools are open source, we are happy to have users play with them and learn how to use them.
Now if you fix bugs or add features that are useful for teams, I would definitely be helpful to pull request them. One of the biggest things if anyone gets around to it is reenable extensions in SmartDashboard. We needed to upgrade to Java 11, and the extensions loading code was broken. I didn’t know enough Java reflection loading to fix that, so that would be a happily accepted PR.
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