Is there WPILib support for FRCSim in the 2018.1.1 version? I can not find build targets for the simulator JAR nor can I find a simulator zip to download for 2018. When trying to use 2017 simulator with the Gearsbot example I get a class not found exception (java) for SpeedControllerGroup (which is not surprising as that class did not exist in the 2017 versions of WPILib).
We removed support for Gazebo, and thus FRCSim, from WPILib during the HALSim work. The old implementation was basically a separate copy of WPILib and was unmaintainable. A community member is working on adding Gazebo support back for 2019 as a HALSim backend.
So, FRCSim is not part of FIRST Power Up? (Sorry, new mentor)
If that’s true, why is all the documentation for it listed at For the 2020 season software documentation has been moved to https://docs.wpilib.org. Documentation for KOP items can still be found here. | FRC KOP Documentation under 2018??
Thanks
We copied all the Screensteps docs from the previous year as-is then modified them for this year. We neglected to update the FRCSim parts. The FRCSim docs are now hidden until we have that working again (again, should be by 2019).
Coolio…I’ll quit trying to figure out why I can’t get it work, then 
Thanks!!
You could try out the simulator my team made instead. It is very low tech compared to Gazebo, but allows us to test out our code. I just got back from being on travel and haven’t totally updated it for this season yet, and there may be some hiccups while I get everything back up to snuff.
Simulator
How we had our robot set up to run the simulator last year
WOW! I will check it out tomorrow! TYTY:D
How did it go?
Glad I found this thread. I spent a couple of hours yesterday trying to get gazebo to run on a free Ubuntu AWS instance. I got it all loaded, fired it up, but it would not render.
Since I’m not ready to buy a RoboRIO, I was hoping to get a simulator running so I could work through the coding process in the off season, and be able to test it virtually.
Great concept, but I understand the software maintenance headache of keeping it going.
Write your code in Python, and you can use the RobotPy simulator. Or you can use pjreiniger’s sim.
I didn’t know that Python was a an officially supported language for FRC. I thought it was just Java, C++ and Labview. Is Python allowed/supported for FRC competition? That opens up an interesting avenue if true.
NVM, no need to answer. Forgive the noob who didn’t read the docs. I found my own answer –> FAQ — RobotPy 2024 documentation
Can anyone comment on the status of this? I’m also having trouble understanding what the HAL simulation interface is if anyone can describe that or point to some documentation/resources on that.
I too am looking for a way to test code without having a robot online. My lab is over 20 miles away and I need to be able to test things from home!
I’ve continued researching this topic. HAL I believe stands for hardware abstraction layer. Built into WPILib is the ability to detect when it is not running on the robot and provide a global variable hal_data which can be used to inject simulated values for sensors and actuators. The python (pyfrc) tools/environment does include a simple simulator which takes advantage of this. I’ve begun porting our java code from last year into python. For now I’m just doing this as an exercise and to get familiar with the python based sim. Then I’ll try to decide if we should give python a go this year, if we can adapt the python sim to the java dev environment or implement a similar concept for a java sim.
Anybody heard anything about AWS RoboMaker? FIRST is listed as the first Partner on the overview page.
The service appears to allow simulations to run in the cloud, but seems primarily ROS based. But then Gazebo is designed to work with ROS too, and that is what the old simulator used.
I forgot the link to AWS RoboMaker: https://aws.amazon.com/robomaker/
As an alternative, if your team uses an AutoDesk product for CAD (like fusion 360), you could try out AutoDesk Synthesis: http://synthesis.autodesk.com