As we near Week Zero it came to my attention that because FIRST doesn’t release the new version of the off-season FMS before the end of the season, teams attending Week Zero events would not have access to the game-specific data (i.e. plate assignment in the form of “LRL”) that FMS would usually provide.
Team 2052 (KnightKrawler) along with 2472 (the Centurions) host a Week Zero event, and I wanted to be able to provide the game data to teams to provide a more realistic event experience.
To that end, I created a small Java application that we will run on our FMS computer that allows us to randomize plate assignments before each match and serve that information over NetworkTables to teams. This does require teams to slightly change their code for our event if they wish to utilize this data, but the changes are minimal.
The code (and an executable release) is available here. That repository also contains instructions for running the app and consuming the data. Contributions are welcome!
Special shout out to one of our Minnesota CSAs, Chris, who also spent some time exploring this problem with me! He stayed up quite late a few nights this week attempting to hijack the existing FMS information in NetworkTables so that we could use the official WPI APIs for the game data (unfortunately that does not seem feasible at this time).