FRC General OS support for 2015

Technical Control System
#1

Hi

I was doing some research, and am a little puzzled on FIRST’s general take on OS support for 2015.

Up till now, I had assumed that FIRST officially supported Windows, and Windows only. And I haven’t heard anything from Beta test teams regarding the DS or other official FRC tools running on other platforms.

Here is where it gets puzzling,
It seems that FRC is planning to announce gazebo as the official supported simulator for at least C++ and Java, if not labview, and beta testing teams seem to have been testing this. Gazebo, however, is currently Linux and OS/x ONLY. They do schedule Windows support, but their roadmap places it’s release date at January 26th, nearly half-way through build season.

Now, Linux- and OS/x-only support is fine for me, as I use Linux as my main os, but it just leaves me scratching my head as to what FIRST is doing. They can’t be expecting ALL teams to use something other than windows, can they?

#2

The simulator is linux-only, but everything else works on Windows - driver station, programming environment, other miscellaneous software. The only thing you need linux for is the simulator.

I would guess that the simulator is linux-only because the roboRIO runs linux - it’s easier to simulate things if you run it on the same (or similar) OS.

#3

The simulator is linux-onl, because it uses ROS. The roboRIO also happens to run a version of linux, but the OS choices are unrelated.

Greg McKaskle

#4

Yes, but don’t you need windows for the DS? I understand that doesn’t matter for development and simulation, but couldn’t they at least provide the DS in a linux-compatible version?

#5