Dashboard to Robot Communication

[2010FRC0537]

LabVIEW dashboards running on a Driver Station (or a "portable computing device" connected to the Driver Station as per rule <R82>) can allow communication both to and from the robot. If a team uses C++ to code the robot, data can be sent from the robot to the Driver Station via the Dashboard class, but communication back to the robot from a dashboard program has not been implemented by the C++ library made by WPI. However, VxWorks has a built-in networking socket library which would allow dashboard software on a laptop within the same network to communicate to the robot (for very limited purposes such as providing minor tweaks and on-the-fly adjustment to values on the robot).

Is it legal for a team to use VxWorks's socket library to recive data from dashboard software on the Driver Station to their robot during a competition match? If so, what ports are open (not firewalled by the Field Management System and related software) that could be used for said communication?

[GDC]

There is nothing in the LabVIEW dashboard to send data to the robot. The C/C++ and Java code also does not support sending data from the Dashboard directly to the robot. Both this year and last year FIRST has operated under the assumption that there was no dashboard to robot communications. Based on your question, we believe you are either misunderstanding some aspect of the dashboard, or confusing the built-in LabVIEW TCP/UDP functions with what is provided as part of the WPI Robotics Library.

While it is true that a user can create a socket connection between their dashboard and the robot and send whatever they want, this will only be available during development. The FMS network is configured such that only the specific ports defined by the FRC Communications Protocol are open to transmit/receive data from the Driver Station. This is the done to prevent the robots from overrunning the available bandwidth.