What's DriveTools?

DriveTools is a customizable FRC Dashboard (a program that allows you to display data coming in from an FRC robot). It's meant for use both in-house for testing and in-competition during matches.

It communicates with FRC robots using NetworkTables (specifically the NT3 protocol). What is that? Find out here or here, more specifics here. Code examples are usually provided when talking about robot code, but it's always good to have background knowledge.

Why did you make it?

I don't have a nice, clean answer to this question. I guess after realizing that a custom dashboard was within reach, I just wanted to try making one. So there, curiosity is the best answer I can give. All the rest I found out after I had already started.

Still, now that DriveTools exists I can do a lot more interesting things with FRC robots. It makes it easy to display stuff other than a single robot on the field display, which for one is very useful. That said I may have just not looked at other softwares that can do this.

Why did you make a dashboard with a game engine?

Right so the observant among you have realized that DriveTools was made with the Unity game engine. I did this for two reasons:

• One, I was already familiar with both it and C#, and the NetworkTables plugin I found worked with it.

• Two, I knew I wanted 3D functionality in DriveTools, and Unity had built-in 3D rendering. I hadn't written any 3D renderers by that time, and thought that was way further out of reach.