Jankboard 2

Team 1280's custom, powerful, and opinionated dashboard for controlling FRC Robots, built with Svelte and TypeScript, and powered by Rust (Tauri).

Unlike Shuffleboard, which attempts to provide an unopinionated "blank slate" with an easy to configure and modular environment for displaying robot data, Jankboard 2 is purpose built for Team 1280's Swerve drivebase robots and their needs. It's tightly integrated with our proprietary robot features, like collision warning and detection, and displays robot drive modes.

Shuffleboard, while easy to set up, lacks the fine-grained adjustments and customization which are afforded by a fully custom solution. The UI looks outdated and is quite ugly. In stark contrast, Jankboard's UI is reminiscient of and inspired by dashboards designed by car manufacturers, making it easy for the driver to get the information they need at a glance, without squinting at Shuffleboard's tiny and ugly UIs. It even includes a full 3D robot visualization, synced directly with the robot's movements in real life.

Even though the dashboard's layout and design are highly opinionated and not meant to be heavily modular, features can still be easily extended via a drop-in app system which supports easy drop-in app integration. Jankboard 2 ships with a few apps by default, featuring a camera feed, robot settings configurator, and even a music player and games.

Installation guide

We recommend installing the latest stable release binaries from our release page, if you're just looking to run the Jankboard. Alternatively, if you can't find release binaries for your system, follow the directions below in the For developers section to build it from source. We will periodically update the releases with new builds when we come out with stable versions, and we follow semantic versioning.

A brief footnote on the name "Jankboard 2"

The name "Jankboard" comes from Team 1280's original attempt at creating a custom dashboard. Though it looked and functioned superficially similar to Jankboard 2, it was not designed with maintainability in mind and became exceptionally difficult to extend and develop as the codebase became bloated. Jankboard 2 is a version redesigned from the ground up with the goal of easy maintainability and richer features. It contains both a completely rewritten frontend and backend, which have been improved in almost every possible way. You can view the original version at its archived repository.

For developers

If you would like to contribute to Jankboard 2, there's only a few simple steps to get the development build up and running.

Prerequisites

Rust and cargo. Check the Rust docs for more information. We recommend you install Rust using rustup. Keep in mind that this is ONLY necessary for development, release binaries do not require Rust.
pnpm, for installing dependencies and the vite development server.
Ideally, NodeJS, but it's technically not required as pnpm brings its own node binary.

Installation steps

Clone the repository. The client folder contains the vast majority of the source code for the desktop app.
cd into the client folder. The configuration files and package.json, This is where stuff like package.json and configuration files for our various tooling are housed. The client/src-tauri directory contains the Rust source code and cargo configuration files for the backend that interfaces with the robot via Network Tables.
Run pnpm install to install dependencies.
To run the desktop app in developer mode (with automatic hot stateful reload and other useful features like error reporting), make sure you're in the client directory and run pnpm run tauri dev. This will install and build the Rust dependencies via cargo and initialize the vite development server for the frontend. Note that since this is basically just running the vite development server and then connecting the Tauri webview to it, there may be slightly inconsistent behavior in dev mode versus production mode.
To create a production binary, run npm run tauri build. Tauri cross-compilation is still in beta, so you should generally try to build targeting the same OS you're currently running. Check the Tauri docs for more information. We also have some Github Actions set up to automatically compile a production build for all platforms, but this is expensive (uses over 30 minutes of our quota), and should only be used for publishing new major releases.

Troubleshooting common issues

If you're experiencing issues with TypeScript type checking or dependency resolution, try opening your editor directly in the client directory so it picks up the tsconfig.json and uses the project's own TypeScript language server.
If you don't have access to a development environment that supports running standalone executables (eg. Github Codespaces), you can try running npm run dev instead of npm run tauri dev, which will open a development server at localhost:5173 with the frontend running in the web. However, app behavior may be inconsistent and you will not get any features from the Rust backend.

Current progress and improvements over (original) Jankboard

Layout, toasts/notifications, music player, and app system ported.
Toast and audio cue system is much more robust
Transitions added almost everywhere to make things smoother
Tauri app created successfully, currently still using Flask backend
Visualization vastly improved with Threlte (Three.js) powered 3D robot simulation
Robot model ported successfully via massive optimization through polygon decimation
Added settings app with options to disable certain features and developer tools for testing
Created dynamic voice prompt system to support new languages very easily
Overhaul backend in Rust
Overhaul visualization (especially camera)
Added Vlad's voice lines (AT LAST)

TODO

Camera cutout overlay
Overhaul audio player system
Further integrate telemetry (like GPWS, collision warning, etc)
Finish re-creating / adding various voice alerts and sequences

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