Witty Dashboard

A port of WPILib's ntcore library for the FTC robotics competition

What's ntcore?

WPILib's ntcore library is the main library used in the FRC robotics competition for communicating between the different dashboards and processing modules (Such as Elastic or a rasberry pi). The library allows for easy communication between devices and data transfer between them.

How is it different from FTC Dashboard

The ntcore library allows for easier usage of data transfer over how the acmerobotics FTC Dashboard approach is, instead of having to declare all of the exposed fields as static and public, you are able to call the publish method directly.

In addition, the ntcore library is only the communication framework between the dashboard and the robot, with no actual dashboard being hosted on the robot itself, which has close to minimal impact on the robot's performance, while on the other side the acmerobotics FTC Dashboard is being fully hosted on the robot together with the framework, which allows for no need to install additional software for the viewing computer, but has a much larger impact on performance.

Getting Started

Interacting With the library

Sample Code:

package org.firstinspires.ftc.teamcode;

import org.frcforftc.wittydashboard.WittyDashboard;
import com.qualcomm.robotcore.eventloop.opmode.LinearOpMode;
import com.qualcomm.robotcore.eventloop.opmode.TeleOp;

@TeleOp
public class TeleOpTest extends LinearOpMode {
    int foo = 3; // Let's create a variable that we will publish as a const int to the table
    double bar = 7.0; // And another that we will publish with a setter

    @Override
    public void runOpMode() throws InterruptedException {
        /* Here we're starting the NetworkTable's server.
           We are providing the opMode instance in order for the library to automatically
           publish data about the opMode
           such as the runtime of the opmode, isStarted data and hardwaremap data,
           that data is found in the WittyDashboard/OpMode topic
        */
        WittyDashboard.start(this); 

        waitForStart();
        
        while (opModeIsActive() && !isStopRequested()) {
            /* We are putting the value onto the table with the key of "Foo" and the value of
               the foo variable.
               Since we haven't provided a setter as an additional argument for the function,
               it will be published as a const int, and changing the data through the network
               table wont modify the original value.
               Aswell, because we're putting the value inside of the main loop, any change in
               the network table will be overwritten in the next loop iteration
            */
            WittyDashboard.put("Foo", foo); 

            /* Here we have also provided a setter for the entry.
               Now, whenever we change the value of the Bar entry in the table,
               it will also affect the bar variable in this class 
            */
            WittyDashboard.put("Bar", bar, this::setBar);
        }

        // Finally, we are stopping the server to clean up the data
        WittyDashboard.stop();
    }

    /**
    * A setter function for the bar variable,
    * this function will be called whenever we change the value of the bar variable inside of
    * the
    * network table
    **/
    public void setBar(double newValue) {
        this.bar = newValue;
    }
}

Installation

Installation using gradle

Coming soon...

Manual installation

For manual installation, you are able to simply download the repository and add it in a folder called wittydashboard in the root folder of your robot's code like this:

- FTCRobotController/
- TeamCode/
- wittydashboard/

next, go to your TeamCode directory's build.gradle and add in the dependencies the following:

dependencies {
    // ... 
    implementation project(':wittydashboard')
}

next, go to the build.dependencies.gradle file found in the root directory and in the repositories block add the following lines:

repositories {
// ...
maven {
        url "https://repo.dairy.foundation/releases" // For coming soon features, isn't required for now
    }
// ...

finally, add the include of the project in the root settings.gradle and press Sync (Will appear at the top right corner with the Gradle elephant icon):

// ...
include ':wittydashboard'