[Peter Johnson]

Originally Posted by andreboos

The contents of each packet are listed in the FRCCommonControlData struct in the NetworkCommunication/FRCComm.h file of the WPILib source. Wireshark (a.k.a. Ethereal) might help with disassembling the packets. I've looked at the packets with Wireshark, but it's hard to extract useful information without a disassembler plugin. Does anyone know why the protocol is supposedly private/closed-source? I would think that FIRST would encourage exactly this kind of innovation.

I've done this, including the Robot->DS direction (which is notably not documented in FRCComm.h), as part of an effort to build a robot side simulator in Python (related to my RobotPy work). So far I have complete functionality of basic robot operation running on Python on a normal PC interoperating with the official DS. Still to be done is enhanced IO, but much of this is documented in the EnhancedIO WPILib headers. I'm planning on completing this, along with implementing a simple non-GUI DS for testing purposes, in the next week or so.

I have not yet published this work, partly because I too am wondering why FIRST has kept the Robot/DS protocol secret, particularly given how easy it is to reverse engineer . I can understand the desire to keep the FMS protocol secret (due to competition network security issues), but not the rest.