Maintaining pure python bindings is a significant amount of work, and as WPILib gains more features and as more and more third party vendors join FRC, it becomes harder to provide support for those features and third party devices. To reduce the amount of work required to maintain RobotPy in the long term, this year we’re moving back to a WPILibC wrapper (which is what we were doing pre-2015).
In the long term, there are lots of benefits to this approach:
I anticipate that python programs on the RoboRIO will have higher performance
We will be able to support more third party vendors with minimal effort
RobotPy will be less effort to maintain for our limited development team
Unfortunately in the short term, the wrappers are not ready yet. My current goal is to have RobotPy 2020 available by the end of the weekend.
RobotPy is a community project and only exists because FRC community members contribute! If you’d like to help out, join us at https://gitter.im/robotpy/robotpy-wpilib!
In the meantime, you really should be working on strategy for your team right now anyways! If you do need to do some prototyping, RobotPy 2019 still works great in simulation and on hardware (with the 2019 image).
The 2019 release of RobotPy is now available! We had some deployment issues, but everything seems to be up now.
The core pieces of RobotPy are updated and available (pyfrc, wpilib, cscore, pynetworktables, utilities)
While we highly recommend using vscode for python development, we have not deployed the robotpy vscode plugin to the vscode marketplace yet. Hopefully later this week.
Pathfinder v2 is not available yet, so there are no RobotPy bindings for them. Pathfinder v1 should continue to work.
NavX support is now in its own library (robotpy-navx), and has been updated for 2019
The CTRE bindings have not been updated for 2019, but I’ll work on those tonight and I expect them to be available later this weekend
No new motor controller bindings have been created yet this year. If you are interested in seeing them available, please comment and we’ll see what we can do (though, this is labor-intensive and we could use more help with this!)
If you run into issues, please let us know or file a bug on github! Get the latest release at https://github.com/robotpy/robotpy-wpilib/releases
I’ve gotten pretty lazy at updating this website, but we’ve had a ton of releases
this year already. Be sure to update to the latest release of each RobotPy
product that you’re using!
s
This is a critical bugfix release for all RobotPy teams. hal.initialize() was being called twice, which can lead to unpredictable and unspecified behaviors.
This also includes some minor updates:
Upgrade to HAL 2017.2.1
Will log versions of third party libraries at startup if they support a new robotpy extension point
