What is BXD: Synthesis?

[jamie.graham]

Hello!

This year, the FIRST High School Autodesk interns worked on the development of a FRC game simulator, and soon hope to release an Alpha version. The simulator, named Synthesis, is built with the ability to import a robot model from Autodesk Inventor and the ability to test code with the simulated robot model. BXD: Synthesis allows robotics students to import their robot model from Autodesk Inventor and test their code and robot design through simulation.

This is the official forum for BXD: Synthesis. Here you can submit any feedback such as bug reports, ideas, questions, or other suggestions that will help improve the simulator.

The project is still only Alpha, so we do not expect everyone’s robot CAD model to work with the simulator. But, we have tried our best to document the process and building a robot correctly to function within the simulator. There are many detailed instruction on the forum for building your robot functionally in Inventor as well as exporting it our simulator and running the code through the driver station in our simulator. We are releasing this so we can get as much bug documentation as possible.

Currently, we only support C++ and Java code interpretation, but we certainly plan to also support LabVIEW in the future. Do not expect code interpretation to work with advanced features, and there is currently no camera or sensor support.  Also, we do not expect full compatibility with 2015 libraries due to the potentially large changes to WPILib’s network communications.

In the soon future, we hope to make BXD: Synthesis open-source. Also, next year's group of Autodesk interns will further develop the project Summer of 2015.

Thank you,

FIRST Autodesk Software Developer Interns