Does anyone have experience using a second display on their driver station/operator console to display the live feed? Our laptop screen is mainly showing diagnostic Smartdashboard values and I was wondering if anyone is willing to post their competition setups showing where the live feed lives?
Back in 2020, we used a second monitor that rose above the driver station that would give us a feed for the limelight. It was only used at one competition and i havent seen it since. However I definitely think it has it’s advantages while driving. Instead of looking all the way down at your laptop display all you need to do is look to your left or right to see your vision feed.
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We tried this once. Let’s just saw that the field crew wasn’t very happy with us. But lots of teams use more sensibly sized versions of this every year.
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If you create a top heavy driver station, be sure you’re putting plenty of hook tape on the bottom to connect with the driver station shelf. You’ll also want to familiarize your drive team with rule H401 and the nuances in the blue box.
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The driver station software (Glass, shuffleboard, smartdashboard etc.) do not handle multiple screens well. You can run more than one of them at a time, bit this coild be a limitation. There are some web dashboards which we have considered, but we have not jad much time to work on it. For now, we are sticking with one screen.
they appear to have some pretty heavy duty suction cups on there.
If you’re thinking about a larger driver station, it’s worthwhile to review the rules about OPERATOR CONSOLE attachment in G301.
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I thought it would be worth mentioning that I’ve been developing a new electron app for FRC web components that supports multiple windows which my team plans on using at our competitions this year:
It’s a bit late into the build season and it’s still under development (although it should mostly work), but if anyone wants to try it and mess around with it before I officially release it, you can download it here: Releases · frc-web-components/app · GitHub (.exe file for windows and the .zip file for macs. I haven’t tested it on linux yet)
Also it doesn’t have dependencies so no need to run pynetworktables2js for it to work.
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Looks great! I assume the tabs and such are added using WPILibs shuffleboard api?
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There currently isn’t an API to control the dashboard/dashboard tabs from your robot code, but using shuffleboard’s API for this is a good idea! For now you add tabs using the + button to the right of the tabs, and you can rename them in the properties view:
It’s not built yet, but we’ve proven out the technology of using an old iOS device with Duet Display ($15 on the App Store) tethered over USB to our driver station. I already had the app, so I scooped an old iPhone 6S Plus for about $50 on eBay to put our robot camera feeds up closer to the driver’s field of view.
The choice of an iPhone 6S Plus is partially driven by economics; the next size class up would either be an iPhone Max-class device or an iPad mini that can run at least iOS 10.3 for Duet, neither of which have depreciated enough for me to throw fun money at it, and while some 9.7" iPads are within reach that’s just awful big to have up in front of a driver.
(Device age doesn’t matter much that I can tell; I’ve run stuff on a fairly ancient iPad Air 2 in the past. If you’ve got the resources to play with more or fancier devices, by all means.)
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We are using a Liliput Monitor.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=lilliput%20monitor&N=0&InitialSearch=yes&msclkid=dd06991fe7e212684b9efb03b65ef112
I got the idea from 254 when they used it several years ago. We plan to use it again this year on an adjustable extended rod coming out of our driver station tray.
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How are you sending the camera feed to that screen?
It’s got an HDMI input so you can use it as a second monitor on your driver station laptop
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Yeah we have it physically working on the laptop but struggling with getting that camera feed from the robot to that screen.
Open whatever dashboard you use to display the camera feed, and drag the window over to the new monitor
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