QFRCDashboard 2025: a performant, reliable, aesthetic driver dashboard

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QFRCDashboard is officially ready for the 2025 season!

QFRCDashboard is an extremely lightweight, high-performance dashboard, designed to be aesthetically pleasing & easy to look at during a match, all while taking up as few driver station resources as possible.

Performance

QFRCDashboard utilizes the very high efficiency & low resource cost of the Qt framework and its QML GUI to ensure that as many resources can be allocated to the driver station app as possible. Additionally, widget & network updates are done as-needed, not constantly or periodically.

On average, QFRCDashboard uses up less than 150MB of RAM, and virtually no CPU! By comparison, Shuffleboard uses up around 600MB of RAM, and up to 30% of the CPU on certain older systems, if not the entire CPU! Under significant load, the difference is even more pronounced, where Shuffleboard can easily climb up to 1GB or more while QFRCDashboard remains under 200MB.

Widgets

In addition to basic data structures & displays, QFRCDashboard also contains several additional widgets to help display more information to the driver:

• Field display with customizable robot look & vertical display
• Boolean (true/false) widget with custom shapes
• Enum (preset string values) widget with custom shapes & configurable colors based on a string value

Robot-Side Interaction

QFRCDashboard contains QFRCLib, a one-file library that can interact with the dashboard in several ways:

• Select tabs
• Send notifications
• Send alerts & errors

Aesthetic UI

QFRCDashboard’s UI takes inspiration from a variety of well-known themes, including Windows 7 Aero and Windows 10 Flat, and combines it with some unique design aspects to create an aesthetic experience that complements QFRCDashboard’s excellent usability.

Easy to Use

QFRCDashboard is designed to be dead-simple for programmers, drivers, and total strangers alike to use. Like Shuffleboard, widgets can be dragged in from a side menu, easily configured or deleted via a right-click menu, and dragged & resized via the mouse. Configuration dialogs have additionally been designed to be easy to understand & use.

Layout Management

QFRCDashboard will automatically open your last-opened layout file on launch, can easily and quickly open up any alternate layouts, and can even download layouts deployed to your robot!

In a future release, QFRCDashboard will additionally support pushing layouts directly to the robot, but due to WPILib limitations, this isn’t currently possible.

Guides

For guidance on installation, usage, and the many additional features present in QFRCDashboard, see its wiki!

Feedback

For feedback, suggestions, bugs, or any issues or questions you may have, place them here, or on the issues tab on GitHub.

I appreciate you reading this post and showing interest in QFRCDashboard. I hope to see plenty of people use it during the season and hope to improve upon your dashboard experience!

Changes

QFRCDashboard has received dramatic changes since last season, and if you used QFRCDashboard in 2024, I encourage you to catch up by looking at the development threads since the initial 2024 release.

QFRCDashboard 2024-25

QFRCDashboard: 2024/25 QFRCDashboard (mirror) is a reliable, high-performance, low-footprint, fully FOSS dashboard software as an alternative to Shuffleboard or Elastic. The initial thread contains lots of information on the initial beta of QFRCDashboard. However, since then, many major updates have been released, far too many to count. Here are a few of the key updates: True theming support & better overall look & feel Drag & Drop New Widgets Graphs FMSInfo Command Activation Swerve Switc…

QFRCDashboard 2025 Beta - a Shuffleboard alternative

QFRCDashboard is ready for 2025 beta testing! In case you’re unfamiliar, QFRCDashboard is a driver dashboard as an alternative (improvement) to Shuffleboard/SmartDashboard. Compared to Shuffleboard, QFRCDashboard is designed to provide a significantly smoother, less resource hungry, and cleaner overall user experience. [Competition] Big Changes QFRCDashboard was completely rewritten from its old form into QML, rather than Qt Widgets. This has enabled several significant QoL improvements that …

Indeed, since 2024, QFRCDashboard has been completely rewritten and expanded; new features have been added, the UI was totally redesigned, and the experience was dramatically improved.

Full Changelogs:

Since 2024

• Total UI redesign
• New & improved widget configuration dialogs
• Dramatically improved performance & resource usage
• Removed Graph & Swerve widgets
• Improved several widgets:
  • Field2d
    • Added shape configuration, vertical display, and red/blue alliance flipping
  • CameraView
    • Added quality, resolution, and framerate configuration
• Fixed dozens of potential crashes
• True theming support

Since the 2025 Beta

• Dramatically improved theming, & support for custom accents
• Lots of UI fixes
• Platform consistency
• Notification support via QFRCLib
• Tab-switching support
• Remote layout support
• Totally redesigned widget configuration UI
• Totally redesigned UIs for tab management, settings, and more

Since the 2025 Release Candidate

• Small UI inconsistencies have been fixed
• UI elements now scale depending on your screen size
• Dramatically reduced build time

[nstrike]

I love this so much, for teams with coprocessor programs on the laptop and potato processors this is the only dashboard they should use! great job! I will be carrying this around at events this year to help those teams out!

[Gold87]

This is really nice, I’m glad to see other dashboards make use of remote layouts!

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QFRCDashboard 2025.0.1

This release improves the UI scaling introduced in the previous release, by reducing its aggressiveness and adding an additional custom scale option for high-DPI displays.

Additionally, a status bar indicating the current connection status has been added.

Full Changelog: Comparing 2025.0.0...2025.0.1 · Q-FRC/Dashboard · GitHub

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QFRCDashboard 2025.1.0

This release contains several notable QoL & aesthetic improvements alongside a critical bug fix, and updating is thus recommended for all users.

Bug Fixes

Fixed certain Windows machines being unable to save config files.

Changes

Improved Configuration Dialogs

Scaling & sizing of widget configuration dialogs has been dramatically improved to fit better on small & large screens alike.

Improved Title Bar

To improve platform parity, QFRCDashboard now decorates its own titlebar that looks identical on all platforms.

DS Resize

QFRCDashboard now supports resizing to the Driver Station window on startup.

FMSInfo Redesign

The FMSInfo widget was redesigned to improve its compactness.

Reef Display

The new reef display widget takes in a boolean array and displays which sections of the reef are occupied.

Perspective is based on the driver station:

Remote Layout Design Fix

The remote layout dialog had a small bug that caused the list highlight to act erratically. This has been fixed.

Platform-Specific

Linux ARM builds are now available! WIndows ARM builds will be added in the future.

macOS builds can now run on both Intel (AMD64) and Apple Silicon (ARM64) Macs.

Full Changelog: Comparing 2025.0.1...2025.1.0 · Q-FRC/Dashboard · GitHub