Many teams have issues trying to read the DS too early. By switching to an optional, we cause teams to check 2 things. Either 1) they explicitly check, and their code is correct, or 2) they just read .value() and their code reboots in a loop. However, because the DS will eventually connect, this 2nd case is ok, and should theoretically be undetectable on the field.
The current DS thread model has some pretty major issues. It makes it difficult to know if all data is from the same remote packet, and if the data changes while the robot loop is running. Additionally, the DS thread is used for a few other things (MotorSafety and State Tracking for EducationalRobot). This also makes sim difficult, as user code has to wait for the thread to know it has new data.
This change completely rethinks how threading works in the driver station model.
First, the DS HAL system receives a new data callback, either from Netcomm or DriverStationSim. Inside the context of this callback, all the low latency data is read and put into a cache. Doing some investigation on the robot side, this is perfectly safe to do, and also ensures a ds packet will not be parsed before we finish reading the current packet data.
After all data is read, the cache is swapped with a 2nd buffer. This buffer just stores the data, none of the HAL DS calls read from this buffer. An event is then fired, stating there is new data ready to go.
Robot code calls HAL_UpdateDSData(). This swaps the 2nd buffer with a 3rd buffer, which always contains the current data. This data will not be updated until HAL_UpdateDSData is called again. Which solves the state problem.
The high level driver station classes have. an updateData() call, which calls HAL_UpdateDSData, and then update button state variables, then data log and update the NT FMS data table (Java also caches across the JNI boundary here, but that could trivially be removed). An extra event provider is provided, allowing other threads to know when this call has been completed.
IterativeRobotBase calls DS.updateData() at the beginning of each loop, and only once per loop. This means all commands will always have the same state.
All of this means there is no longer a DS thread. Everything happens synchronously. This means Sim and testing is easier, as you can just call DriverStationSim.NotifyNewData(), and then DriverStation.UpdateData(), and you can guarantee that all the DriverStation.*** data is up to date.
As for Motor Safety and Educational Robot State Handling, those can all be handled by their own threads. The Educational Thread only needs to run under EducationalRobot, and MotorSafety will only be started if there is a motor safety object enabled.
PMD requires that variables only initialized in the constructor be
final. The compiler errors if those final variables aren't guaranteed to
be initialized, so extra else branches were added to ensure that.
PMD also requires that classes with only private constructors be final.
The equivalent C++ classes were finalized as well, except for
TimeInterpolatableBuffer because it doesn't expose factory functions.
A lot of these are breaking changes. frc::Timer was replaced with the
contents of frc2::Timer. The others were in-place argument changes or
removing deprecated non-unit overloads.
Based on run of include-what-you-use.org to identify unused include files in various .h and .cpp files.
The changes mostly fall into 3 categories:
- Actually unused includes - copy-paste errors, not removing includes after cleaning up code, etc
- A too-broad include used where a more specific (and hopefully smaller) header will do
- Interface .h files including headers only needed by the .cpp implementation - moving from .h to .cpp
will mean that code which uses the .h doesn't pay the price of processing the header file they don't need
This avoids users having to call both IsOperatorControl() and IsEnabled() to figure out if their robot is
enabled and in the teleop state. The expression above involves calling two methods that each have their
own lock.
These new methods should only involve locking one mutex, since only one call is made to HAL_GetControlWord().
Remove WaitForCachedData as it's no longer required.
Also properly handle caching / transition detection logic that occurs at the
WPILib level.
This also changes DriverStation::IsNewControlData() to check for WPILib-level
caching instead of wrapping the HAL function.
This is useful for both cleanly exiting from simulation and for unit testing
at a framework level.
This change required removing move constructor/assignment from IterativeRobot.
The old headers were moved into folders because doing so avoids polluting
the system include directories.
Folder names were also normalized to lowercase.