Robot Installation

Note

This is the RobotPy 2019 documentation, RobotPy 2020 will be available soon! See our post on Chief Delphi for more details.

These instructions will help you get RobotPy installed on your RoboRIO, which will allow you to write robot code using Python. If you install RobotPy on your RoboRIO, you are still able to deploy C++ and Java programs without any conflicts.

Note

If you’re looking for instructions to use NetworkTables from Python, you probably want the pynetworktables installation documentation.

Automated installation

Warning

This guide assumes that your RoboRIO has the current legal RoboRIO image installed. If you haven’t done this yet, see the screensteps documentation for imaging instructions. To image the RoboRIO for RobotPy, you only need to have the latest FRC Update Suite installed.

RobotPy is truly cross platform, and can be installed from Windows, most Linux distributions, and from Mac macOS also. Here’s how you do it:

Unzip the RobotPy zipfile somewhere on your computer (not on the roboRIO), and there should be an installer.py there. Open up a command line, change directory to the installer location, and run this:

Windows:   py -3 installer.py install-robotpy

Linux/macOS: python3 installer.py install-robotpy

It will ask you a few questions, and copy the right files over to your robot and set things up for you.

Next, you’ll want to create some code (or maybe use one of our examples), and upload it to your robot! Refer to our Programmer’s Guide for more information.

Upgrading

From the same directory that you unzipped previously, you can run the same installer script to upgrade your robotpy installation. You need to do it in two phases, one while connected to the internet to download the new release, and one while connected to the Robot’s network.

When connected to the internet:

Windows:   py installer.py download-robotpy

Linux/macOS: python3 installer.py download-robotpy

Then connect to the Robot’s network:

Windows:   py installer.py install-robotpy

Linux/macOS: python3 installer.py install-robotpy

If you want to use a beta version of RobotPy (if available), you can add the –pre argument to the download/install command listed above.

Manual installation (release)

Warning

This isn’t recommended, so you’re on your own if you go this route.

If you really want to do this, it’s not so bad, but then you lose out on the benefits of the automated installer – in particular, this method requires internet access to install the files on the roboRIO in case you need to reimage your roboRIO.

  • Connect your roboRIO to the internet

  • SSH in, and copy the following to /etc/opkg/robotpy.conf:

    src/gz robotpy http://www.tortall.net/~robotpy/feeds/2018

  • Run this:

    opkg update
opkg install python37 netconsole-host

  • Then run this:

    pip3 install robotpy-hal-roborio wpilib

Note

When powered off, your roboRIO does not keep track of the correct date, and as a result pip may fail with an SSL related error message. To set the date, you can either:

  • Set the date via the web interface

  • You can login to your roboRIO via SSH, and set the date via the date command:

    date -s "2015-01-03 00:00:00"

Upgrading requires you to run the same commands, but with the appropriate flags set to tell pip3/opkg to upgrade the packages for you.