2020 Kickoff Release of WPILib
We are pleased to announce the availability of the 2020 kickoff release (2020.1.2) of WPILib, the official FIRST libraries for robot programming in C++ and Java. As announced in today's FRC Blog post, the NI 2020 FRC Game Tools have also been posted, so you can get a head start on getting all the 2020 software installed before kickoff! 2020 vendor software from suppliers should be available very soon as well.
Documentation
Thanks in large part to a community effort, the control system software documentation (including WPILib) has moved from ScreenSteps to Read The Docs, and can now be found at https://docs.wpilib.org/ (if you have trouble accessing this location, https://frcdocs.wpi.edu/ is an alternate location with the same content).
Changes for 2020
The focus of C++ and Java WPILib development over the past year has been on major library improvements and features, including:
- Command Based Framework Rewrite (the 2019 framework is still available as an option, but we highly recommend using the new one for new projects)
- PID Controller Rewrite
- High level controls, kinematics, & trajectory generation (replaces pathfinder)
- Robot Characterization Tool (useful for LabVIEW teams as well)
- Simulation GUI (run your robot code on the desktop)
All languages are also benefiting from these 2020 NI RoboRIO image changes and FPGA improvements:
- Addressable LEDs support
- Duty Cycle Encoder support
- CAN Bus reduced latency
- Control Packet reduced latency
For more details, see what's new for 2020 in the documentation!
Credits
The WPILib 2020 development team is nearly all volunteers; in alphabetical order:
- Eli Barnett (command based framework rewrite, robot characterization)
- Cooper Bennet (machine learning)
- Thad House (HAL, Visual Studio Code extension, Windows installer, GradleRIO)
- Peter Johnson (volunteer lead, simulator GUI, NetworkTables, CameraServer, FRCVision)
- Brad Miller (WPI lead)
- Grant Perkins (machine learning)
- Joe Ross (RobotBuilder, other improvements)
- Austin Shalit (Maven infrastructure, Mac testing, various tool/library improvements)
- Dalton Smith (Read The Docs documentation)
- Dustin Spicuzza (robot characterization)
- Tyler Veness (high level controls and trajectory generation)
We'd also like to thank the following individuals for their major contributions this year:
- Benjamin Antupit (documentation porting)
- Ryan Blue (documentation porting)
- Declan Freeman-Gleason (robot characterization)
- Prateek Machiraju (geometry, kinematics, trajectory generation, robot characterization)
- Matt Morley (documentation porting)
- Emil Smith (documentation porting)
- Claudius Tewari (robot characterization)
Major past contributors to WPILib include Jaci Brunning, Sam Carlberg, Evan Gilgenbach, Alex Henning, Jonathan Leitschuh, James Kuszmaul, Peter Mitrano, Kevin O'Brien, Patrick Plenefisch, Fred Silberberg, and Griffin Tabor.