GUI Robot Simulator now available in pyfrc

Technical Python
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If you haven’t used it yet, pyfrc is a python 3 library designed to make developing code for RobotPy (the Python interpreter for the FIRST Robotics Competition) easier.

As one of the new features in pyfrc v2014.2.0, there is now a robot simulator GUI built into pyfrc that features many of the available objects of WPILib (a screenshot is attached). After installing pyfrc and enabling it in your robot code, the simulator is launched via your robot.py file using the following command:


python3 robot.py sim

pyfrc is available via pypi and is easily installed via pip. It has been verified to work on Windows, Linux, and OSX. Check out the website for installation instructions. If you find any bugs, please file an issue on github!

Screenshot from 2014-01-31 00:44:01.png
Screenshot from 2014-01-31 00:44:01.png597×517 24.2 KB



Screenshot from 2014-01-31 00:44:01.png
Screenshot from 2014-01-31 00:44:01.png597×517 24.2 KB

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FYI, I’ve made a lot of bugfixes and improvements to the simulator, so if you’ve installed it you’ll definitely want to upgrade. Some improvements include:

  • Working watchdog support
  • SmartDashboard communication
  • More WPILib features supported
  • Various bugfixes and improvements

Team 1418 has been using this for development and it has definitely helped our students debug problems before they ever get to running code on the robot. If anyone else is using this, I’d be interested in knowing.

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