Many teams in the FIRST Robotics Competition use Git to manage their code.. Some teams even test their code on Continuous Integration services such as Travis CI or Jenkins. With the growing popularity of Git in FRC and the good coding practices that come with it, I was wondering if there was any interest in a System that would work with the RoboRIO to manage code versions and make deployment a lot smoother.
The idea is simple, whenever code it committed, the CI service builds the artifacts and tests them. If all tests are successful, the artifacts are uploaded to an external server where, upon update or boot, the RoboRIO will fetch the artifact, load it and restart the program. Alternatively, the required development tools could be loaded onto the RoboRIO system (javac/gradle or the FRC Toolchain) and the RoboRIO acting as a Git Remote to push to. This could potentially streamline the build process and make management much easier to achieve.
For RobotPy, I believe no build system would be required as the sources could be loaded really easily, whereas for Java teams, the FRCUserProgram (or module if running Toast) would be built and copied to a temporary cache to be reloaded on code reboot. C++ teams would require the toolchain to be ported to the RIO.
Before any developments are made, I'd like to ask if there is any interest in the project and if so, what features or concerns you have.
A repo has been setup over at OpenRIO and is free for anyone to contribute to, however, feel free to post your thoughts here.
I look forward to the development of this project,
~ Jaci R