Video showing how to use Eclipse for FRC 2013 development without plugins

[java4first]

Hi -

Thanks for the video, we even managed to get this working for a couple of Macs that students are using for development. However, the problem is that it doesn't cover getting the "deploy" then "run" Ant targets working, only "build". Deploy seems to work - as it just builds the jars to deploy, but run fails because it is missing a setting for a property that has the IP address of the robot (and there may be other things once you get past this). I am guessing it's because we haven't 'configured' the plugin by adding the team number.

Has anyone figured out the last step in this process? Can you re-install last year's plug-in, and then just update to the new Java classes for this year? Or is there something simpler ...

Next year all us Eclipse users need to get together, and get at least one team on the Beta test - so that we can have an Eclipse plugin for doing development without having to resort to NetBeans. I don't care about all the new features of WPILib and any fancy wizards for coding ... I just want to be able to extend the SimpleRobot and deploy it via Eclipse.

Thanks in advance if you figured this out.

[markmcgary]

Originally Posted by java4first

Hi -

Thanks for the video, we even managed to get this working for a couple of Macs that students are using for development. However, the problem is that it doesn't cover getting the "deploy" then "run" Ant targets working, only "build". Deploy seems to work - as it just builds the jars to deploy, but run fails because it is missing a setting for a property that has the IP address of the robot (and there may be other things once you get past this). I am guessing it's because we haven't 'configured' the plugin by adding the team number.

Has anyone figured out the last step in this process? Can you re-install last year's plug-in, and then just update to the new Java classes for this year? Or is there something simpler ...

Next year all us Eclipse users need to get together, and get at least one team on the Beta test - so that we can have an Eclipse plugin for doing development without having to resort to NetBeans. I don't care about all the new features of WPILib and any fancy wizards for coding ... I just want to be able to extend the SimpleRobot and deploy it via Eclipse.

Thanks in advance if you figured this out.

In my 'user' folder on my Mac is an 'invisible' file named ".sunspotfrc.properties". (Yes, it starts with a dot)

Inside this file are defined these properties:

sunspot.home=/Users/mark/sunspotfrcsdk
remoteaddress=10.43.22.2
wpilibj.home=/Users/mark/sunspotfrcsdk/lib/WPILibJ

The user folder name should be your user name. The 'remoteaddress' property will be your robot CRIO IP address, based on your team number.

I hope this helps.

[NotInControl]

Originally Posted by java4first

Hi -

Thanks for the video, we even managed to get this working for a couple of Macs that students are using for development. However, the problem is that it doesn't cover getting the "deploy" then "run" Ant targets working, only "build". Deploy seems to work - as it just builds the jars to deploy, but run fails because it is missing a setting for a property that has the IP address of the robot (and there may be other things once you get past this). I am guessing it's because we haven't 'configured' the plugin by adding the team number.

So I am not sure why I didn't see any CD notifications for additional posts to this thread. I apologize for the delay in response, I believe you have overcome your problems, but I am going to answer your questions just in case anyone else stumbles upon this thread.

In the video around the 20:00 min mark, I show how to set up a deploy ant configuration to deploying code to the cRIO (not just building), and also show how to set up the debug configuration as well. The difference between these configurations and the build configuration is that you enter the IP address as an argument to the script -Dremoteaddress=10.xx.xx.xx (what ever IP your cRIO is).

Now this will work for you as long as you are updating a system that had previous FRC plugins (because you have a .sunspot.properties file in your home directory). One of the items I forgot to show in the video was updating the .sunspot.properties file.

This file lives in your home directory and was installed by the 2012 FRC Java plugins or the 2013 Netbeans plugins. So if you never installed the plugins (which you don't have too) you wont have this file, however this file tells the Build script where to find all the target files. So if you don't have a .sunspot.properties file in your home directory, create one. If you do, you can modify it. (note the period "." before the file name. ) You will need to show hidden files in order to see it. If you don't know what your home path is, type %HOMEPATH% in the run command on windows, or just open terminal on a mac. The properties file MUST BE saved in the home path or the build script in eclipse wont be able to find it, and then you won't have any ant target scripts.

The file defines the sunspot.home variable and the cRIO IP address. So it
should look something like this:

sunspot.home=C:/Documents and Settings/user/sunspotfrcsdk
remoteaddress=10.21.68.2


That's all the file needs to contain. So in this case, that path is the location of my 2013 sunspotfrcsdk folder and the remote address is the IP of my cRIO. If you have it set in the file, you do not need to set it in the arguments of the ant script like in the video. If you enter an IP address in the ant script argument, while having an IP in the properties file, the argument in the ant takes precedence over the text file.

I have been meaning to make this annotation in the video,
I just haven't had the time cause of the build season. :/

So sorry for any confusion,

Hope this helps,

-Kev