2020 Notes

Here are things to know about 2020 that are different from prior years. If you find things that are different that aren’t in this list, please submit a bug report.

Note

Most importantly, the API documentation has NOT been upgraded for 2020 yet. However, our goal is that most API should be identical/close to the 2019 API. If you find something that is different, please file a bug report!

Why is everything so different this year?

From 2015-2020, RobotPy maintained a pure python version of WPILib and bindings around third party vendor libraries. However, maintaining RobotPy is a lot of work, and as WPILib and third party vendors add even more features it was becoming slowly impossible to keep up.

In 2020, we switched to using mostly automatically generated wrappers around C++ libraries. Ideally, once completed, this will significantly lower the amount of work needed to update/maintain RobotPy in the future. Unfortunately in the short term, there’s a lot of work needed to get there (however – we’re most of the way there as of this writing!).

See this github issue for a longer discussion about this.

2020 has been a bit bumpy, but with your help hopefully we can smooth out the rough spots and make 2021 a seamless transition!

Upgrading from prior years

You should uninstall the following packages manually:

py -3 -m pip uninstall robotpy-hal-sim robotpy-hal-base

Windows-specific notes

• The Visual Studio 2019 redistributable package is required to be installed.
• CTRE and REV do not support simulation in 32-bit programs, so you must have a 64-bit Python installed.

OSX-specific notes

CTRE and REV do not support simulation on OSX, so these packages do not work at this time. You can work around this by checking for an import error:

try:
    import ctre
except ImportError:
    ctre = None

...

if ctre is not None:
    ..

A mock solution could be provided for simulation. If you’re interested in developing something, contact us!

Class inheritance

When inheriting from RobotPy provided objects, you must call the super constructor otherwise your code will crash with a difficult to diagnose error:

from wpilib.command import Command

class MyCommand(Command):
    def __init__(self):
        Command.__init__(self)

Where is physics and tests?

We are working on the 2020 implementation, and then once completed will focus on adding support for these.

Some community members have expressed interest in fixing support for testing/physics, but the work still has not been completed.