FIRST Robotics Competition Blog

Beta Testing

Despite the modifications to the 2021 season, the FRC Control System Team is still working on improvements to the software provided to teams and would like to invite teams to assist with Beta Testing those improvements. We’re looking for 20-25 teams per software language to participate in our annual FIRST Robotics Competition Control System Beta Test to help shake out any bugs in our updates to the software before the season.

This year these changes include improvements and translations of the software documentation site, improved basic simulation and unit testing capabilities and more. Beta Testing will begin in late October and have specific task deadlines through the end of November. Teams may continue to test through Kickoff, but software starts to lock in early December so testing done in December may not be done in time to fix any bugs discovered.

Teams may apply to Beta Test 2021 software even if they are not yet sure of their plans to participate in the 2021 season. Teams do not need access to their robot or control system hardware in order to apply.

Interested teams should fill out the form here. The initial deadline is October 23, however the form will remain open and teams may be admitted on a rolling basis until capacity is reached. Teams should receive notification of selection status no later than 72 hours after the initial deadline if submitting before the deadline or 72 hours after submission if submitting after the deadline.

Usage Reporting

The FIRST Robotics Competition software has a feature called ‘usage reporting’ that tracks what WPILib objects are created in each team's code and reports that data back to the field when the robot is connected. Data from the 2020 season can be found here. Some notes about the data:

• The data has been anonymized. Team numbers have been removed and the data has been re-sorted so teams are not in order by team number.
• Data is collected by the FMS software at events so 2020 data is only available for teams who competed at official events in 2020.
• We can only track the objects teams create in code. If a team creates extra motor controllers that aren't on the robot, they will still be captured by this system. If a team creates motor controller objects of the wrong type, that wrong type will be captured by this system.
• Counted objects and TRUE/FALSE show the largest number of any given object used in any one match (i.e. if a Robot had 2 Encoders in match 1 and 3 Encoders in match 7, 3 will be reported). This means that if a team that switched motor controller types, or IMUs, or anything else during the season, the sheet will show numbers for both devices. Language and Framework report what was used in the last recorded match.
• Some objects naturally result in double counting (e.g. Encoders use Digital Inputs).