Robostart: A Standalone CLI WPILib Project Creator

Robostart is a CLI utility designed to create a WPILib project for teams competing in the FIRST Robotics Competition.

WPILib currently has a standalone robot project creator, and one built into their distribution of VSCode. However, the standalone project creator is slated to be removed for the 2027 season. Thus, Robostart was born.

demo-compressed.mp4

Usage

Robostart can be invoked via the command line as such:

robostart

Spawning robostart with no arguments will launch an interactive prompt dialogue to create the project you would like.

You can also inform Robostart of many of these dialogue options with flags.

robostart -h

Usage: robostart [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -l, --language <LANGUAGE>
          Language to initialize [possible values: java, cpp]
  -p, --project-type <PROJECT_TYPE>
          Type of project to initalize [possible values: example, template]
  -w, --wpilib-version <WPILIB_VERSION>
          What version to download
  -o, --output-prefix <OUTPUT_PREFIX>
          The parent directory for the new project
  -n, --name <NAME>
          Name of the new project
  -t, --team-number <TEAM_NUMBER>
          Your team number
  -h, --help
          Print help
  -V, --version
          Print version

Building

Robostart is built with rust, and so the use of cargo to build the project is fairly simple.

cargo build

Alternatively, one can run a debug version of Robostart with cargo as well.

cargo run -- # whatever flags you want to pass go here