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Getting Started with Robot Development

WPILib

WPILib has their own guide for setting up your development environment, however since their guide is designed for everybody across FRC, it has a lot of information not relevant to our team. Following the guide below should get you set up for developing robot programs for Yeti. If you run into any issues in your set up, please leave a comment below with any improvements or questions you have, and check out the WPILib guide as it may have the solution to your problem.

NOTE: This guide is for Windows, macOS, and Linux computers. You will NOT be able to write robot programs with ChromeOS.

Download the installer for the latest version from the WPILib Github. Scroll down to assets and download the appropriate installer for your operating system.

Read this if you use a mac

Before installing WPILib, mac users will need to install XCode Command Line Tools. These are tools developed by Apple for C++ development which WPILib requires to run. To do so, open the Terminal app on your mac and run the following command

xcode-select --install

You may need to run this command administrator privileges, in which case run the following command and enter your password when prompted

sudo xcode-select --install

Next, you need to install the appropriate installer for the processor your mac uses, either an Intel or M series (arm64) chip. If you are unsure which your mac uses, do the following:

  1. Click the apple logo menu in the top left of your screen
  2. Click about this mac
  3. If it says you have an Apple M1/M2/etc. chip, download the arm64 installer. otherwise download the Intel version
  1. Open the file you downloaded
  2. Run the WPILibInstaller
  3. Click Start
  4. Choose the Tools Only installation method. DO NOT CHOOSE EVERYTHING
Why Tools Only instead of Everything?

The Tools Only option will install all the development tools you need to code an FRC robot. The way you actually use those tools to write your code is up to you.

Selecting Everything will install all the tools in addition to a dedicated instance of VS Code, a very popular code editor that can be used to write just about any kind of program. If you already have VS Code installed, it will still install a new version. This is one reason I do not recommend this path, as it can be confusing what version of VS Code you are using.

The other reason is because here on Yeti, we use IntelliJ to write our robot code. This is because IntelliJ is specifically designed for developing Java programs, and so has many useful features that VS Code lacks out of the box. Additionally, I have found that Java development in VS Code is simply much buggier because it is not specifically designed for it while IntelliJ is.

Install for this User or Install for all Users? (doesn't apply to mac)

If you share your computer with anyone else, for example a parent, you should install for this user. If your computer is just yours, you should install for all users. The reason being is that installing for all users requires administrator privileges, which you may not have if this is not your computer. The difference does not matter too much, but installing for all users may create less problems in the future in terms of other software dependencies or updates.

IntelliJ

  1. Download IntelliJ Community Edition (NOT Ultimate) here: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download
  2. Run the installer and install IntelliJ
  3. Open IntelliJ
  4. Select the plugin tab on the left
  5. Select the marketplace tab at the top
  6. Search for and install the FRC plugin

Once you have this set up, download the 2022 robot project from GitHub. It would be best to clone the repository using git, but if you are unsure of how to do this, you can just click the green Code button and download it as a zip.

We also have a template robot project with some basic subsystems and commands.

Open the project in IntelliJ. When the project opens, make sure you click the load gradle project button. If you don't see this, check the notifications tab. Leave a comment down below if you have any questions or run into any problems with this guide!

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