[WPILib Blog] 2021 Kickoff Release of WPILib

[AustinShalit]

Posted on the WPILib Blog, 1/6/2020: https://wpilib.org/blog/2021-kickoff-release-of-wpilib

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 2021 kickoff release (2021.1.2) of WPILib, the official FIRST libraries for robot programming in Java and C++.

Changes for 2021

There have been many additions and new features added by the C++ and Java WPILib development team over the past year, including:

• A new installer to support macOS and Linux and to improve ease of use. Please see the installation instructions as the process has changed from previous years.
• A WebSocket interface to allow remote access to robot code being simulated in a desktop environment
• Support for the Raspberry Pi-based Romi robot platform
• Glass – A new robot data visualizer
• Model-based control with various flavors of Kalman filters (linear, extended, unscented), pose estimation wrappers (fuses odometry with vision measurements), and a linear-quadratic regulator
• Documentation has been translated into a variety of languages! Click on the menu on the bottom left of the desktop site (bottom of the left hamburger menu for mobile) to view a list of languages.
• RobotBuilder has been updated to support the new command based framework!

This is just a small selection of the new features added this year. For more details, see what’s new for 2021 in the documentation!

Also, please note that the WPILib gitter has been discontinued. Please use GitHub Discussions to contact the WPILib team.

Installation Instructions

• WPILib installation guide
• GitHub download page

Thanks

WPILib is run by a small team of volunteers and the community. A list of core members are as follows.

• Cooper Bennet
• Thad House
• Peter Johnson
• Nestor Lopez
• Prateek Machiraju
• Brad Miller
• Gabriel Deml
• Grant Perkins
• Joe Pokorny
• Joe Ross
• Austin Shalit
• Dalton Smith
• Dustin Spicuzza
• Tyler Veness
• Yoni Weiner
• Zhiquan Yeo

A huge thanks to these members of the community for their amazing contributions to the library.

• Benjamin A
• Corey Applegate
• carbotaniuman
• Jason Daming
• Declan Freeman-Gleason
• Kaitlyn Kenwell
• Matt Morley
• Claudius Tewari
• Starlight220
• Vasista Vovveti
• Itay Ziv

The introduction of translations to the documentation would not be possible without the help of these amazing translators and their teams.

• Ofek Ashery (Hebrew)
• Regis Bekale (French)
• Hasan Bilgin (Turkish)
• Bruno Toso (Portuguese)
• Max Cuevas (Spanish)
• Yeve Rivkin (Hebrew)
• Heber Sepúlveda (Spanish)
• Atlas Zhang (Chinese)
• Min Zhang (Chinese)

Major past contributors to WPILib include Eli Barnett, Jaci Brunning, Sam Carlberg, Evan Gilgenbach, Alex Henning, Jonathan Leitschuh, James Kuszmaul, Toby Macaluso, Paul Malmsten, Peter Mitrano, Kevin O'Brien, Patrick Plenefisch, Fred Silberberg, and Griffin Tabor.

Additionally, thanks to everyone who contributed to the core library, documentation, tooling, and translations. You can view a list of the individuals who contributed to the core allwpilib repository here. Contributors to the other projects are in their respective repositories.