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.
Big Changes
QFRCDashboard was completely rewritten from its old form into QML, rather than Qt Widgets. This has enabled several significant QoL improvements that were impossible in the old version.
A Reimagined UI
QFRCDashboard’s UI has been completely redesigned to be more modern, bubbly, and smooth, with improved theming and accenting support. Currently, light, dark, and midnight themes are available, and red, blue, and purple accents are available. Custom themes will be supported in an upcoming release.
Aside from theme and accent support, the UI is designed to be more in line with Elastic and Shuffleboard, taking some inspiration from well-known themes like Windows 7 Aero & Windows 10 Flat.
Improved Widget/Camera menus
The NT Widget and Camera menus now slide in from the side a la Shuffleboard. This allows you to simply open a menu and drag the widget directly onto the current tab, rather than the clunky old system of double-clicking on a popup menu. This results in a much nicer experience that’s easier for non-programmers to understand and use.
Copy & Paste
One significant missing feature from the old version was the ability to copy and paste widgets. The new version finally introduces this feature; simply right click a widget and paste it onto the current tab or even a different tab. All changed properties will be copied to the new widget.
Field2d Improvements
The Field2d widget (used primarily for odometry view) has been entirely overhauled. New settings enable the user to change:
- Robot color
- Shape (Robot, rectangle, circle) – i.e. for displaying non-robot objects
Furthermore, it now supports a vertical display (good for field-relative views), and mirroring based on the alliance, making the view that much closer to reality.
Camera Quality & Improvements
The camera viewing widget is far improved from last year, with additional performance improvements and the introduction of quality control settings.
By changing the FPS, compression, and resolution, you can dramatically reduce the bandwidth sent over the network, helping to keep your robot network under the 7Mbps radio limit without compromising user experience.
Note that this menu will be overhauled and improved in a later release, including moving the quality option to become a slider.
To Come
Many features are planned to be added, including:
- Trajectory Display on Field2d
- Switch tabs based on an NT value
- Custom Theming
- Lots of UI fixes
- Overhauled configuration menu
Installation
QFRCDashboard uses GitHub Actions, and is fully supported on all platforms–Linux, Windows, and macOS.
See the latest release here: Releases · Q-FRC/Dashboard · GitHub
Windows builds have the additional option of an installer, allowing you to create desktop and start menu shortcuts for QFRCDashboard.
Please note that due to the nature of the rewrite, old save files use a completely different format and are not compatible with the new QFRCDashboard. Additionally, due to lack of demand relative to maintenance load, the graph and swerve widgets have been removed–for development purposes I highly recommend using AdvantageScope, which has these features built-in and is much nicer to use for that purpose.
For more specific installation instructions, see the wiki.
Feedback
When using QFRCDashboard, please bring feedback on potential improvements either to this thread or to the GitHub’s issues tab (direct link).
Documentation
Documentation is incomplete so far, but how-tos on installation & usage can be found on the wiki.
I appreciate everyone’s feedback and hope to see plenty of people use it during the season!