My team wanted to use the smart dashboard on the classmate, but couldn’t find a way to use it with the Driver Station software. To solve this problem I made a launcher program that will run the Dashboard software.
The only requirements are that you have Java in your system path, and that you can extract a zip file to the root of your hard drive.
Just extract the zip to the root of your C: drive, let windows merge all the folders, and let it overwrite the “FRC Dashboard.exe” file.
Thanks Bot190! Team 997 installed this over the weekend and it works great. After updating to the latest SmartDashboard we’re excited to have CSV logging this year.
Can you tell me what you did to make your launcher? I used it with version 0.5.1 of the SmartDashboard and it worked great.
There is a new release of the SmartDashboard and I want to update to it since it has some bug fixes that I am particularly interested in. I believe I know what it would take to update, but would like to see your procedure on how to make it work like you did the previous Dashboard.
Sorry about that, i forgot about updating this. The latest version includes version 0.6.0 of the SmartDashboard.
All it is is a simple c++ program that executes java with the path to the jar given as an argument.
Can you use the smart dashboard at competition?
Yes, it’s completely legal to do so.
SmartDashboard?
Help me get up to speed on this.
Joe J.
Hi Joe,
Good to hear youre back.
SmartDashboard is an addition to WPILib for C++ (and Java?). The previous options for troubleshooting were to printf to the console output of the Crio or a modified printf function that was created for the first generation operator console. The first year of the Crio era used a blue Linux box made by Quickbyte for the driver station and a print function was created to send output to its display. It was limited to about 8 lines of 20 characters.
For 2010 FIRST decided to change to using a laptop PC originally made by Intel called a Classmate PC. The Driver station software is actually two parts. The unchangeable part handles Joystick and digital/analog I/O input and communicates with the Crio. This part also supports displaying the limited print function from the QuickByte console. The second part is an open Labview application that can display the Crio I/O and a camera stream. this application can be cutomized or removed. It is best used with Labview on the Crio.
Smartdashboard was created last year to replace this Labview screen with a window that supports output from C++ code without worrying about formatting on the Crio side. It consists of a class in WPILib that allows sending several types of data from anywhere in the program along with an ID string for each. All these prints are added in the stream back to the Dashboard PC. On the PC side, the Labview application is replaced with a Java app that opens a blank window. When the Crio starts to execute, the stream of data sent shows up in the window as the ID string, data. Initially the order is random. the user can drag the data around the window to organize it and the result can be saved. After this, the layout can be restored each time the system boots. there are several display formats available including plotting the data with no change to the sending program.
Hope this makes enough sense to get started. There is a Sourceforge project for this as well as a couple of other team created dashboards. You can get to them from the Kit of Parts website / C++ support. There are some posts about it on the usfirst forum also.
Look for a beta test team around you soon to find out if anything is changing for next year.
Good luck and again, welcome back! I still owe you for the Dewalt development. We have some form of them almost every year since 2005.