Team 7028 Task Reports

[agasser]

Task 1
No issues install WPILib.
NI displayed an error during the uninstall of last year, but trying again was successful.

[agasser]

Task 4
The change to the Java Units Library caused a lot of extra work. We used the library throughout our code in 2024, and there were over 100 references to manually update. I'm surprised this breaking change was made. Was there no way to follow a compatible upgrade path, deprecating this year and removing next year?

• It appears the negate() method was removed, this is a breaking change that wasn't documented.
• The mutable object example in the documentation needs the imports fixed.

[sciencewhiz]

negate exists and is deprecated in beta 2

[sciencewhiz]

Can you try importing your 2024 code again with beta 2? The importer should update the imports and some of the simpler pieces of code, which should reduce how much you need to manually change.

[agasser]

I added a note to #51 with a couple more results.

It would be helpful if the conversion also handled the zero method to convert to the new style from:

MutableMeasure<Angle> pitch = MutableMeasure.zero(Radians);

to:

MutAngle pitch = Radians.mutable(0);

[agasser]

Thanks for adding negate() back and deprecating it, but it's missing the Javadoc comment to indicate that it's replaced with unaryMinus()

[sciencewhiz]

the javadoc deprecation comment is there. https://github.com/wpilibsuite/allwpilib/blob/b6de7acbdb1cb0f9db0c270d0e584ef8f9050cec/wpiunits/src/main/java/edu/wpi/first/units/Measure.java#L148-L161

[agasser]

Task 4
Just starting to research, but where do I find info on the LED animation API? I don't see anything in the docs.

[agasser]

Smart, you might be onto something. The real problem is that there are two logical views, and one wraps.
The use case is a single LED strip that starts on a corner and runs around the perimeter of the robot. We want to run mirrored animations, so one view wraps around the strip:

Physical:  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9
           ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑  ↑
   View0:  2  1  0                 4  3
   View1:           0  1  2  3  4

I think I could create 3 views, and then apply the same pattern with different offsets.

[agasser]

I have another case, but it's probably out of scope because it doesn't fit the design. It probably needs to be stateful.
We have a short boot animation that runs when the robot starts. It seems like pattern isn't designed for this sort of use because the animation has a defined start state, and runs to completion, then ends.

[SamCarlberg]

The use case is a single LED strip that starts on a corner and runs around the perimeter of the robot. We want to run mirrored animations, so one view wraps around the strip

Hmm. I think we'll need to add a way to create a view that can wrap around a strip like that. We currently prohibit views from being created with negative offsets, but something along those lines might be what we need; either that, or a way of explicitly opting out of the automatic reversal if the starting index is after the ending index.

We have a short boot animation that runs when the robot starts. It seems like pattern isn't designed for this sort of use because the animation has a defined start state, and runs to completion, then ends

Yes, this is something that would need to be custom code. Wrapping in a command would probably be easiest, since that already manages initialization and execution lifecycles

[agasser]

No worries, they're both odd cases.

[SamCarlberg]

I can see wrapped LED strips being a common enough usecase that it may be useful to have support for it in WPILib. Stateful animations probably not, since you can do that with a combination of commands and custom patterns; and a generic library solution likely wouldn't be broadly applicable