Our competition season is over, but I’m still very confused about a particular issue we had with the sendable chooser, which we use to select our auton. We use the Java smart dashboard. The chooser, last year and half of this year, would work without a problem. The second half of this year, we never were able to get it to show up again. What caused it? Was anyone able to do something to get it to show up? If you couldn’t, what was your alternative to selecting your autonomous mode?
We used the SendableChooser this year and last. Each year we’ve had glitches with the dashboard. Last year it was loosing sync between the DS and the robot if we didn’t completely terminate the dashboard between matches. This year, there was a WPILib update mid build-season that fixed the SendableChooser being missing on the dashboard.
Is there a chance you hadn’t updated WPILib on the driver’s station computer?
We’ve had the same issue a couple times, though each time it was something different.
1) Like said above, check your WPILib version and make sure it’s up to date.
2) If your WPILib is up to date, maybe your SmartDashboard now isn’t. Try updating that.
3) Check and see if you have multiple SmartDashboard jars on your computer. We had an issue last year where we had multiple on the computer and sometimes the old one which didn’t work with our version of WPILib would open instead of the proper one.
4) If nothing else has fixed it, go into your Dashboard and go to File -> New. Sometimes our Dashboard “breaks” and won’t respond, update, and/or connect to the robot. Resetting it by making a “new” Dashboard would fix it and cause our choosers to immediately appear.
All weekend we did the following
1 create smart dashboard and save it
2 next time SDB was opened the Sendablechooser was gone so…
3 close SDB
4 open save file in Notepad++
5 delete sendablechooser widget and save file
6 reopen SDB when connected to robot
7 do not save when ask when closing SDB
8 if you do save repeat step 4 before opening again
We put short cuts to the save file and SDB jar file on the desktop in case it happens on stage and it did a quick close,edit,open we are back in action. 7 practice matches, 8 qualifiers maybe 4 SDB resets always had a autochooser.
Edit: Make a copy of the save file with out the Endablechoose and over right the bad file is another option. We have to restart our dash board after each robot reconnect. Why because the GRIP mjpg steamer will not refresh or reconnect.
We’ve seen that issue too. But for us, it’s quite simple to fix by using the following steps:
- Close the smart dashboard. We always choose “Don’t save” because it will always mess up our carefully prepared layout.
- In the FRC Driver Station app, click the “Setup (gear)” tab and change the dashboard type to “Default”. This will bring up the labview dashboard.
- Then change the dashboard type to “Java” again. This will close the labview dashboard and the Smart Dashboard will come up with all the Sendable Choosers present.
You don’t needed to goto the driverstation app. If you drill through the windows file system c:\users"username" \wpilib ools\SmartDashboard.jar make a copy and paste a shortcut on the desktop. Here you also find useful tools like the onlineviewer and robotbuilder.
The save file defaults to c:\users\username\Smartdashboard\save.xml at lease for me.