As all of you start gearing up for the 2022 season, the Control System Team is gearing up too! With the new REV Robotics control system devices and the roboRIO 2.0 both debuting this season, WPILib will have a few more breaking changes than a typical season. Some of those changes may be due to the new devices, while some may be changes that we have wanted to make for a while and held off to keep code compatible. Before anybody gets too worried, the overall scope of these changes is still pretty small; it probably won’t take most teams more than a meeting or two to update old code, especially with the help of the Changelog documentation that will be available.
Given this larger set of breaking changes, and to allow teams to experiment with the new hardware as soon as it is available (assuming teams purchase their own hardware), we are going to do beta testing a little bit different this year. Unlike previous years, where we capped the number of teams participating in the test, this year we will allow an unlimited number of teams to participate. Teams will still have to complete an application and designate a small number of individuals to access the site where the beta software is going to be hosted, but any team that submits a complete, reasonable application will be accepted. Similar to testing in previous seasons, there will be a list of testing tasks and we strongly encourage teams to complete, and provide feedback on, these tasks in order to help us make sure the software is well tested prior to the season. Feedback must be submitted by early December for inclusion in the Kickoff release, but teams may continue testing until Kickoff.
The first release of Beta software is expected to be available around the first or second week of October. Teams completing the application prior to October 4th should expect to receive further information about accessing the beta site on or before October 8th. Applications completed after October 4th will be processed 1-2 times per week. The application process will close on December 17th to allow us to focus on preparing for the season.