The Rationale Behind: Our FRC Dashboard (Drivetools)

by 10tothe6

There are a lot of programs that run on driverstations that can display information from the robot to anyone who happens to be driving it. We all know them as dashboards. Here are the most popular ones, from what I've seen:

• WPILib Shuffleboard
• WPILib SmartDashboard
• LabVIEW
• Glass
• AdvantageScope
• Elastic

As you can see, there are a few to choose from (to be fair, not all of these are the kinds of dashboards you would use during a match, some are more suited for testing in-house). Which one did we pick? Well, we didn't.

The dashboard that our team uses is called Drivetools, and it's developed by FAR Robotics (that's a fancy way of saying that it's developed by me, 10tothe6). So add that one to the list, I guess.

Alright so why did I decide to make my own dashboard? First let's look at what I dislike about the existing dashboards. (I admit that I'm not the most well-informed, feel free to let me know that I'm wrong about some of these)

• LabView: It's... old. And not very easy to work with, from what I've seen.
• Shuffleboard: It's just not as customizable as I'd like.
• SmartDashboard: I've never seen it not glitch out, and display the text weirdly. Also old.
• Glass: Actually I can't think of anything, I guess it's a little busy.
• AdvantageScope: Never tried it, but I know it doesn't work that well for competition scenarios.
• Elastic: Best one that I've seen, I don't have any gripes about it.

Obviously that's not enough, I mean why not just use Elastic? The big reason is that as a part of FAR Robotics I want to do a lot of more advanced things that involve communication from the computer to the robot. It's really useful to have a custom solution for that, which is why we didn't use some other teams custom dashboard.

In the end, it comes down to features. There are a few really specific features that none of the other dashboards have, that Drivetools does. And hey, it's a good opportunity to try and improve on things, right?

(I encourage you to try Drivetools by the way, I think its cool)