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Unread 09-01-2011, 00:48
jhersh jhersh is offline
National Instruments
AKA: Joe Hershberger
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Re: Python's Legality

Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Johnson View Post
My opinion (of course), but looks like RobotPy (and other scripting languages such as Lua) will be legal for 2011:

COTS definition (page 8 of Section 1):
"For the purposes of the FRC, generally available software modules obtained from open sources (e.g. professional publications, commonly used FRC community-accessible web resources, industry source code repositories, etc.) that are not specifically affiliated with individual FRC teams shall be considered COTS items."

<R28> COTS items that are generally available may be used on the ROBOT.

Caveat emptor, of course. And keep in mind RobotPy is not supported by FIRST (so if you run into issues with RobotPy at a competition, there won't be staff there to help).
I tend to agree with your assessment. All of the safety protocols are handled in the FPGA and the FRC_NetworkCommunication task. As such, nothing that RobotPy or Greyhound Lua can do will allow any avenue to get around the safety features. In addition, both of these implement their robot I/O access by scripting a wrapper around WPILib for C++ using SWIG. I can't imagine that FIRST would see any reason to disallow the use of these languages, but the final say is theirs.

-Joe
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