What cool and useful things have you done with simulation this year?

Technical Programming
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Inspire us with your code!

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I made my robot move… without a robot.

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Here’s a video of a simplistic simulation I did using functionality available in WPILib, to allow our students to test the logical correctness of code for our intake/shooter before it was actually completed.

Code at 2022-robot/physics.py at main · frc6367/2022-robot · GitHub

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Went from time-based drive forward and backward to a path-planned autonomous.

Achieved with < 5 hours of on-hardware development time.

Only took a summer of physics sim work and a month of architecture design before that though :slight_smile:

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We don’t own a field to test autos so I made a virtual one with the help of Advantage Scout/Kit :slight_smile:

All of the following is a simulation running a network-tables server and the display is running as a network-tables client and reading from the simulation outputs

This is a very old version of our current 5-ball

Due to the simulation tools, the first time we got on a local team’s field, it was up and running in 4-5 hours

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I’ll tag this under the useful things of the OP. One of the large challenges we have on our software team is the relative ability of each member. We have some that will spend the whole calendar year struggling to get the concepts of object oriented programming, and the very basics (I mean basics, like variable declaration, and assignment being two different things). We have others that are interested in doing the more advanced controls etc.

For a good portion of the year, I was the only software mentor, which stretches my time thin with each student. To solve that this year, we built a WCD drive simulated robot that mirrors our own chassis designs for the last few years:

Falcon500 motors (TalonFX controllers), 2 on each side.
Navx Gyro, SPI

From that build, it enabled the students of all abilities to make tremendous progress, independent of their starting skill levels. Some were doing basic driving, some were doing some basic commands like turn with a Gyro to an angle, and some were able to to trajectory following.

I’ve said it a bunch here on CD, and on discord, thanks to the maintainers that build the simulation pieces. It’s really a massive raise the floor tool for FRC.

Our codebase is here. I’d be happy to better collaborate with folks for other base projects (like arms, intakes, whatever).

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