RobotPy 2012.1

[Peter Johnson]

I've released the first release of RobotPy for the 2012 season: 2012.1

Download from http://firstforge.wpi.edu/sf/go/proj...robotpy.2012_1

Major changes from 2011.3 release:

• Python upgraded to 3.2.2!
• WPILib rev 2993 (2012/01/08 release) support (all classes including Kinect). Requires cRIO image v43.
• Support for both 8-slot and 4-slot cRIOs.
• New loader / boot.py which tries to improve the behavior of instant reloads. If the user code raises a SystemRestart exception, the entire Python interpreter exits and should be restarted by the loader. This is still not all that reliable as the interpreter doesn't do a particularly good job of cleaning up after itself, so use with caution at the moment.
• Unified release (one download) with simple installer.

Release notes:

• A number of the new additions to WPILib (Buttons, Commands, NetworkTables, Preferences, SmartDashboard) are implemented via native Python instead of wrapped C++. They have seen only moderate testing but as they're native Python they should be easy for anyone to fix if they're broken!
• While the new version is 99% compatible with existing code, if you wrote an __init__() function in your SimpleRobot/IterativeRobot-derived main robot class, you need to ensure you're calling super().__init__(), otherwise you'll see an exception raised from the library level about not being able to find "self.ds.InDisabled".
• Vision support still isn't all that great. All of the high-level WPILib "vision" classes are wrapped but most of the lower-level "nivision" functions have not been. Depending on your coding level, if you want to use the nivision functions, you're probably better off writing some high-level vision processing function in C++ and wrapping it to call from Python. This is relatively easy to do (see the robotpy source code's Packages subdirectories).

GitHub (for those interested in the details): http://github.com/robotpy/robotpy