A reliable, high-performance, low-footprint dashboard for use with FRC.

A mirror of this repository is available on my Gitea instance.

Key Features

• Small RAM/CPU footprint
• Customizable fonts for title & text (i.e. big numbers)
• Enum widget: different colors for different string values
• Powerful, customizable graphs
• Simple, semi-modern look & feel
• Support for swerve display, FMS information, field widget
• Different shapes for colored widgets (bool/enum)
• Run commands

Lightweight

Dashboards don't have to be resource hogs. In fact, dashboards should be designed to take up as few resources as possible. Dashboards that use up resources like nobody's business will cause packet loss and comms issues when run on driver stations!

Because of this, QFRCDashboard has been specifically designed to use up as few resources as possible. Compared to WPILib's Shuffleboard (measured on a ThinkPad X220--percentages include all CPU cores):

Metric	Shuffleboard	QFRCDashboard
Memory (Base)	530MB	<200MB
Memory (Heavy Use)	600MB-1.2GB	200-250MB
CPU (Base)	2-10%	0-1%
CPU (Heavy Use)	10-30%	0-3%

Network activity hasn't been specifically measured, but expect better network performance out of QFRCDashboard. (Note that Shuffleboard's numbers may vary. Sometimes I've seen it eat the entire CPU on computers 5x as powerful as mine.)

QFRCDashboard excels with its lightweight performance thanks to many factors:

• The efficiency of C++ and Qt vs. Java and JavaFX
• No menu that subscribes to every topic at once
• Shared subscriptions between duplicate topics
• Widgets only update and repaint when they need to
• Minimal, deferred repaints

Download

Windows, Linux, and macOS builds are available via GitHub Actions. Currently, all use WPILib 2024.3.1. Release builds are available either through Actions or in the releases tab:

NOTE: Windows Release builds require the Visual C++ runtime to be installed. For convenience, an executable has been included to install the runtime in the portable build.

Development/debug builds are also available on a per-commit basis. These builds are generally unstable, have far larger executable sizes, and will perform slower, but are useful for users who wish to have the latest features or for developers who want to contribute and test.

Forking

Follow the GPL3 of this project, credit the original project, and make it clear that your application is not QFRCDashboard itself. Cool? Cool.

Contributing

Code is code. Write code. I accept the code. Thumbs up, handshake, wahoo

Building

This project uses CMake. Additionally, you must initialize git submodules first.

git submodule update --init
cmake -S . -B build
cd build
make -j$(nproc)

You can use CMake's install commands to install for packaging and system installs.

sudo cmake --install build --prefix /usr
cmake --install build --prefix ${PKGDIR}

Submodules

If you don't want to install protobuf and ntcore to your system, CMake options are provided for such:

• USE_SYSTEM_NTCORE (default ON)
• USE_SYSTEM_PROTOBUF (default ON)

Examples:

cmake -S . -B build -DUSE_SYSTEM_NTCORE=OFF
cmake -S . -B build -DUSE_SYSTEM_NTCORE=OFF -DUSE_SYSTEM_PROTOBUF=OFF

Using the system ntcore with the bundled protobuf is unnecessary and will break things. If you have ntcore installed to the system, protobuf will also be installed.

Because Windows sucks with system libraries you'll have to enable them anyways. I think with Qt Creator you have to explicitly set them.

Ubuntu

sudo apt install qt6-base-dev build-essential qt6-multimedia-dev ninja-build
git clone https://github.com/binex-dsk/QFRCDashboard.git
cd QFRCDashboard
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
make -j$(nproc)

Windows

• Install Qt from here. Take note of where you download it!
  • Note that you will need to create a Qt account.
• Install CMake https://cmake.org/download/ (add to PATH)

git clone https://github.com/binex-dsk/QFRCDashboard.git
cd QFRCDashboard
mkdir build && cd build
cmake -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH="C:\\Qt6\\6.6.1\\msvc2019_64" ..
cmake --build .
C:\Qt6\6.6.1\msvc2019_64\bin\windeployqt.exe .

OR use CLion or Qt Creator from the online installer.

Miscellaneous Notes

QFRCDashboard is created solely for the purpose of A RELIABLE, LOW-OVERHEAD FRC dashboard. QFRCDashboard is NOT created with eye-candy or intense theming in mind. Contributions and suggestions to theming will be accepted and worked on, but without user request or contribution, QFRCDashboard will see very few updates to theming.