LabVIEW Video Tutorial: Customizing The FRC Dashboard To See Your Data

[LVMastery]

This Blog entry is the 12th in a series intended primarily for FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) teams and their mentors.

http://www.lvmastery.com/TipJar2009-02-10

In this blog entry, I discuss how to customize the default dashboard project. The real benefit here is the opportunity to see whatever internal robot data you want on a computer at the driver station during competition.

I discuss:

• How to add to the Dashboard Data Typedef in the robot project
• How to modify the Build Dashboard Data.vi to enable or disable the default data transfer and how to save those default values
• How to modify the Build Dashboard Data.vi to write custom data

• How to modify the default Dashboard project to allow you to resize and scroll the Dashboard VI
• How to modify the default Dashboard project to use the same dashboard data typedef as the robot project
• How to create indicators to display your custom data
• How to replace the default logo with a custom team logo

Ben Zimmer
-- LV Mastery Team

[Joe Hershberger]

Awesome. I was looking forward to this one.

One thing I want to make sure people understand is that the data that we added to the initial DashboardData cluster is unlikely to be useful to teams and takes up a bunch of space. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% of the space in the packet. Please feel free to remove any or all of it that you don't care about.

Also note that you can print text to the User Data section of the Dashboard using the Set User Data VI on the Dashboard palette. The API ended up with an unfortunate control type. It takes an array of bytes instead of a string. Simply use the string to array of bytes conversion to pass your string in. That parameter does make it counter-intuitive to use, but once you know about it, it can be really useful since you can put quick debug messages there and you don't have to modify any data types. It does take up more space in the packet to convey the information, though, since it's sent as an ASCII string instead of binary data and it's harder to display in a compelling way since it's just a box of text. You can use the Format Into String VI to prepare the data to display.

As for text feedback, you can now print to the driver station LCD as well.

As always, excellent work, Ben.

Cheers!
-Joe

[LVMastery]

Thanks Joe, and thanks for the pointers on the user data and LCD screen.

All the best,
Ben

[adamsong]

Build Dashboard Data.vi is not in my robot main.vi, any suggestions?

[Joe Hershberger]

Build Dashboard Data.vi is not in my robot main.vi, any suggestions?

This is very old. That VI is not used any longer. It is now handled by the Smart Dashboard / Network Tables API.