Our team has been having problems trying to use the SFX Dashboard. Specifically, there are problems like it not closing properly, and more importantly, we cannot load any saved layouts that contain any commands on them.
Anyone else had any similar problems? Is it just some weird anomaly that we screwed up on?
Yes - Team 2180 just gave the SFX Dashboard a try today and we found exactly the same problems. Especially the loading issue is annoying. We had to rebuild the dashboard several times and each time, it would save correctly, we could see it in the correct folder and when you request an OPEN it locates the file correctly based on its extension but nothing is loaded.
Very strange. At this point I am going to toss it back onto the heap of “you get what you pay for” Unsupported software is just that – unsupported.
(SFX developer here)
Interesting. Could you send me the file? Also how is it “not closing properly” ?
Our team has been having similar problems. Once we save our layout on SFX dashboard and try to load it later with the DS, the new layout does not show up. We tried saving it a couple of times, but every time we tried to load it, it would not show up the new layout.
SFX is incredibly buggy and I refuse to use it for reasons such as this – SFX may have more fancy controls but how useful are they if they’re unstable?
Welcome to SFX.
My son was lead programmer for our team last year and he managed to make SFX work well enough to us it. We used it a bit this year but also found problems trying to save. We also had problems with PIDCommands appearing on the SmartDashboard side, but not with a green play button. At that point we switched to normal smartDashboard and we haven’t gone back.
Not sure if SFX is buggier this year, or if my son had some tricks to manage it last year. He’s off at college 9hrs away so the team hasn’t been able to take advantage of his skills.
Has anyone been able to re-open saved layouts in SFX yet? We’ve also had to go back to the original SD because of this issue even though we really love all of the new features in sfx.
I finally found a stack trace of this and was able to reproduce it. The short answer is its due to the label decorators. if you remove them, it works fine. The long answer is much more complicated and appears to be a bug in JRuby’s reflection process if its running inside a Jar (as sfx is currently packaged). I’ve attached an exploded version of SFX here, but it requires you to run it via the command line, though I added a bat file and sh script so it may work by double clicking, but I haven’t tested. Also to keep this file under CD’s limit you have to download jruby seperately, but there are instructions in run-instructions.txt
sfx-raw-nojar-fix-20150331.zip (657 KB)
sfx-raw-nojar-fix-20150331.zip (657 KB)
Has any progress been made on this issue? I will try the exploded version for now.
SFX is being replaced by shuffleboard. WPI won’t be supporting SFX beyond this season.
Sweet! I will give shuttleboard a try then…
I suppose this is still a “beta” version?
Yes, it’s still in beta. There are development releases here that you can download and try out, but they may be buggy and still lack some widgets. Releases starting next week will most likely be more stable