Rust for FRC Robots w/o WPILib

Technical Programming
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I want to run Rust on my team’s robot without using WPILib. I’m fairly new to FRC, but am very comfortable with Rust, programming, and Linux. I was hoping I could get some advice from a WPILib dev on how to go about this.
I’m particularly interested in how to interface with the roboRIO: I can’t find a library or decent documentation on how to do so. As I understand it, the roboRIO is a Linux box with a collection of libraries on it. Where should I get said libraries for development use? I’m on Gentoo, so Ubuntu packages are out of the question.

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Okay so yes you can but not recommended to go fully without WPILib and you’ll be relying on bindgen a lot for c++ libs

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You might want to check out this unofficial library… the last release was ~4 years ago but there’s more recent commit history than that.

The roboRIO runs a NI-customized installation of Linux with additional FRC-specific libraries installed. The FRC-specific library headers can be found here: GitHub - wpilibsuite/ni-libraries: Houses the NI Libraries for WPILib building, and the main image libraries can be downloaded separately from their package repository here: https://download.ni.com/#ni-linux-rt/feeds/academic/2023/arm/

Also, WPILib builds a cross-compiler toolchain to Rio that can be found here: GitHub - wpilibsuite/opensdk

Note it’s likely a lot easier to wrap WPILib’s HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) than use the NI FRC libraries directly. The HAL is a C API, while some of the NI FRC libraries are C++ (namely the FPGA interfaces).

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Thanks!

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This is the way.

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Echoing this. There is a lot of work in the HAL you do not want to duplicate.

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I was able to find a slightly newer library that wasn’t a direct port when I looked a few weeks back. I’ll try find it and post it here.

Edit: GitHub - arfur-rs/arfur: Rust + FRC = safe + composable + expressive

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You should be using WPILib, there’s a lot of work that goes into the low level HAL stuff that by the time you recreate it or get some unofficial library you could just learn java or C++

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Thanks! Hadn’t seen this, but will try it out.
Edit: They have Rev drivers! This is great!

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I know, I’m not doing it to avoid learning a new language. I want to do it because I’ll learn a lot more about how FRC robots work.
As a few others have suggested, I will definitely use the WPILib HAL if I make my own library.

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As a note, it appears they’re still building for 2022. You’ll probably have to fix that on your own

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Creator of Arfur here. Yeah, we’re working on some higher-level robotics stuff before getting back to updating the WPILib bindings. The problem is that once the 2023 API was stabilized, WPILib releases a pre-release for 2024 :). So it’s hard to decide which bindings to use. We’ll probably just update straight to v2024-prerelease and just skip a step. This is all experimental, anyways.

Any help would really be appreciated, we’re a low-staff team. If anyone wants to help, I would love to help explain the codebase so we can work on updates and features.

Let me know if you have any questions.

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