Python 3 for the FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC)

PyFRC 2015.3.6 released -- now with real joystick support!

The pyfrc simulator now supports using real joysticks as input when you have pygame installed for Python 3. If you have pygame installed and a supported joystick plugged into your computer, pyfrc’s simulator will automatically detect them and feed the joystick input to the simulator.

Because pygame can be tricky to install on some platforms, it has not been added to the requirements for pyfrc, and pyfrc’s simulator will continue to work for you without pygame or joysticks.

Thanks to Carter Fendley for adding this support!

pynetworktables2js 2015.1.0 released

Team 1418 and the RobotPy project are happy to announce the release of pynetworktables2js, a cross platform library that forwards NetworkTables key/values to a webpage, so that you can easily write a Driver Station Dashboard for your robot in HTML5 + JavaScript.

Because the communications layer uses NetworkTables, you can connect your web interface to all FRC languages (C++, Java, LabVIEW, Python).

The original working prototype for pynetworktables2js was originally created by 1418 student Leon Tan, and I’ve polished it and turned it into something that other teams can use. Team 1418 won an Innovation In Control award this weekend at the Greater DC regional, in part because of our shiny+functional HTML dashboard (look for a source code release soon!).

Lots of students and mentors know how to create simple web pages to display content, and there’s lots of resources out there for creating dynamic content for webpages that use javascript. There is a lot of visually appealing content that others have created using web technologies – why not leverage those resources to make something cool to control your robot?

PyFRC 2015.3.4 released

Contains some physics related and CANTalon bugfixes. Speaking of which, pyfrc has physics support again, which means you can run your robot on a simulated field again! It’s pretty useful for testing out autonomous modes and some other limited behaviors. Check out the pyfrc documentation for more details!

As before, there are samples distributed with pyfrc that show you how you can take advantage of this really cool functionality that puts python a step above the rest for FRC programming!

RobotPy 2015.0.14 released

This is a bugfix release of RobotPy, but teams are strongly encouraged to upgrade.

  • When HAL functions that use a status return a warning, warnings.warn is called instead of throwing an exception. This problem has been most observed when using the PDP, but in theory it could happen in other locations (see https://github.com/robotpy/robotpy-wpilib/issues/143)
  • Updates to the simulated HAL

See all changes on github.

Critical RobotPy bug; RobotPy 2015.0.12 released

This is a critical bugfix release of RobotPy, and all RobotPy users are recommended to upgrade. We sincerely apologize for releasing this after build season has ended.

  • There was a race condition that could cause the DriverStation thread to crash at startup, and the robot would not respond to driver input, with no notification to the user that this had occurred (other than netconsole output)
  • SampleRobot programs now only report readiness to the Driver Station after robotInit has finished

See all changes on github. You can download the latest release from github, or use the installer to upgrade your current installation of RobotPy.