The CCRE: A comprehensive award-winning robot code framework

[Cel Skeggs]

Developed by FRC Team 1540, the Flaming Chickens, the Common Chicken Runtime Engine (the CCRE) provides a powerful yet easy-to-use software framework for use by FRC teams during competition season and beyond. It has a number of major features:

1. Separation of concerns: separation of concerns is where all code for specific functionality is in exactly one place, and is regarded as good for maintainability. The CCRE helps foster this using its higher-level abstraction and composition techniques.
2. Emulation: the CCRE has a fully functional emulator built right in! This means that robot code can be tested before deployment - very useful during build season when the robot that the code’s written for doesn’t exist for a few weeks.
3. Networked operator interface: the CCRE features a match-ready frontend known as the Poultry Inspector. It’s designed to replace (when used on a touch screen) or augment the physical control panels used by many teams with customizable information displays and controls.
4. Code portability: code written with the CCRE can run on both cRIOs and roboRIOs, from the exact same project. This minimizes the time needed for teams to get up to speed on roboRIO software. (The CCRE runs in Eclipse, which is the standard development environment next year.)
5. Support: the CCRE is completely open-source, and the primary developer can be directly contacted. (See the GitHub page for the email address.)
6. Prebuilt modules: the CCRE includes more complex self-contained modules of code that are useful for most robots, such as the Logging Framework, the Networking Framework, the Autonomous Framework, etc. This means that you get lots of helpful functionality with minimal work on your part.

The source code and documentation for the Common Chicken Runtime Engine can be found on GitHub.

As part of the documentation, we have fifteen tutorials on different parts of the system, from installation and simple robot code, to advanced guides on Logging and Cluck-based Networking.

See an example of CCRE code here!

The CCRE has now existed for about a year and a half, and we have used it for all of our robots in that time, which includes preseason, prototype, competition, and non-competition robots. After using it for the season, we presented on it at our competitions and it won the Archimedes Innovation in Control Award at the 2014 World Championships.

Note: This is the second CCRE thread on these forums. After a year more of development, we’ve decided to create a new thread with up-to-date information on the CCRE, as we were unable to modify the original post on the previous thread.