FRC Programming (Raycast Extension)
- 5 Devlogs
- 10 Total hours
An all-in-one Raycast extension for FRC developers to instantly access WPILib docs and handle frequent unit conversions.
Ship #1
Pending review
Devlog 05
Finished cleaning up the repo and wrote a temporary file explaining how to manually install the extension, then submitted it to Raycast for review.
Raycast’s review bot then caught a handful of bugs I hadn’t noticed. So, I fixed those bugs and pushed those changes. I also swapped the C++ documentation code out for code that safely parsing the data as plain JSON instead of using eval, so it only ever reads data and never executes anything. During that process, I also got a bunch of TypeScript errors due to not properly giving everything an object type.
The extension is now in Raycast’s review queue. Next up is just waiting on that, and addressing anything else reviewers flag. In the meanwhile, anyone that wants to try out the extension can manually install it using the Try it Out link.
Devlog 04
The Python documentation feature turned out to be very annoying. The search index url I am using to fetch the documentation was being way too inconsistent. Half the time, it gave the data and half the time, it gave back a Cloudflare auth page. So I decided to drop that feature entirely. Here is the search index url I was using in case anyone knows how to get past the auth page: https://robotpy.readthedocs.io/projects/robotpy/en/stable/searchindex.js. The screenshot shows what is supposed to fetched from this url.
I also built a feature to look up status indicator lights for various FRC hardware components, but realized there’s already a single webpage that has all of this information laid out well. So instead of rebuilding that information inside the extension, the feature now just opens that webpage directly.
Next up, I’m going to finish tidying up the repo, write a temporary instructions file explaining how to manually install the extension (since it isn’t live yet), and submit it to Raycast for review so it can be officially published.
Devlog 03
I improved how the extension fetches the Java documentation. Instead of fetching 600 something URLs (one for each class in the WPILib library), it now only fetches one search index URL.
I also got the C++ documentation lookup feature working. Unfortunately, the C++ documentation’s search data doesn’t include as much detail as the Java one. It doesn’t tell you what functions each class has, so the C++ results are a bit more bare-bones for now. You can see what it looks like in the attached screenshot.
I’m currently working on adding Python documentation support. It’s been a bit annoying since the search index URL for the Python docs sometimes is sending HTML instead of javascript. Once I get that fixed, I can finally get to the motor/sensor lookup feature.
Devlog 02
The extension can now fetch the Java WPILib (the library mainly used in FRC) documentation and display all the classes and methods in the library. Once you fetch the documentation (takes ~one minute), you only have to fetch it again when you want to update what you have cached.
Tomorrow’s plans are to show descriptions of classes, show descriptions of methods, and add either Python or C++ WPILib documentation.
