Development tools library for python interpreter used for the FIRST Robotics Competition
Project description
pyfrc - RobotPy development library helper
pyfrc is a python 3 library designed to make developing code for RobotPy (the Python interpreter for the FIRST Robotics Competition) easier.
This library contains a few primary parts:
A built-in uploader that will upload your robot code to the robot
An implementation of wpilib that will run on your computer
This is a library designed to emulate parts of WPILib so you can more easily do unit testing of your robot code on any platform that supports python3, without having to have a cRio around for testing.
NOTE: This is not a complete implementation of WPILib. Add more things as needed, and submit patches! :)
Integration with the py.test testing tool to allow you to easily write unit tests for your robot code.
A robot simulator tool which allows you to run your code in (vaguely) real time and get simple feedback via a tk-based UI
Installation
using pip to install
The easiest installation is by using pip. On a linux/OSX system that has pip installed, just run the following command:
$ pip-3.2 install pyfrc
If you have python 3.3 installed, you may need to use ‘pip-3.3’ instead.
On Windows, I recommend using pip-Win to install packages. Download it from:
https://sites.google.com/site/pydatalog/python/pip-for-windows
Once you’ve downloaded it, run it to install pip, and run the following command in its window:
pip install pyfrc
Non-pip installation
You must have the following python packages installed. Make sure that you install them for your python3 interpreter, as pyfrc only supports python 3.
py.test (http://pytest.org/)
Once you have those installed, you can just install pyfrc the same way you would install most other python programs:
$ python3 setup.py install
Usage
Once you modify your robot code, you can directly run your robot.py file and the pyfrc features will be enabled. You must modify your code slightly to make this work correctly.
Robot Code Modifications
There are three main modifications that you need to make to your robot.py to take advantage of the features provided by pyfrc.
Your import statement must catch the wpilib import error and import wpilib from pyfrc instead.
Your run() function must return the Robot object you create
You must add a block that calls wpilib.run() at the bottom of your program
robot.py:
- try:
import wpilib
- except ImportError:
from pyfrc import wpilib
…
- def run():
robot = MyRobot() robot.StartCompetition()
return robot
- if __name__ == ‘__main__’:
wpilib.run()
py.test unit testing integration support
pyfrc supports testing robot code using the py.test python testing tool.
See ‘samples/simple’ for an example test program that starts the robot code and runs it through autonomous mode and operator mode.
To run the unit tests, just run your robot.py with the following arguments:
$ python3 robot.py test
For more information on how to write py.test tests, see the documentation at http://pytest.org , or refer to the samples directory for examples.
robot simulator
The pyfrc robot simulator allows very simplistic simulation of your code in real time and displays the results in a (ugly) user interface. To run the simulator, run your robot.py with the following arguments:
$ python3 robot.py sim
If you wish to run so that your simulator can connect to the SmartDashboard, if you have pynetworktables installed you can run the following:
$ python3 robot.py netsim
Or you can use this instead:
$ python3 robot.py sim –enable-pynetworktables
As there is interest, I will add more features to the simulator.
Implementation Notes
SmartDashboard/NetworkTables support
The implementation of wpilib contained with pyfrc has a ‘fake’ implementation of SmartDashboard/NetworkTables within it. The simulator functionality can also use pynetworktables as the NetworkTables base when instructed.
Internals
The implementation of wpilib that you can run on your computer is contained in the ‘lib’ directory. If you use the ‘run_test.py’ script to run your tests, it will automatically setup the python path correctly so that loading fake_wpilib will load the correct package.
The lib/pyfrc/wpilib directory is the code for wpilib directly copied from the RobotPy implementation. This code tries to load a module called ‘_wpilib’, which is a binary python module on the robot. However, in the directory lib/pyfrc/wpilib/_wpilib there is a python package which emulates a lot of the functionality found in the binary package for wpilib.
The StartCompetition function is monkey-patched by run_test.py so that the library and test runners can load properly.
Contributing new changes
Fork this git repository
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am ‘Add some feature’)
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request on github
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