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Introducing Sidekick RC

The essential software companion for First Tech Challenge

Sidekick RC makes it easy to understand, iterate on, and improve your robot performance, whether you're a new Blocks user or a world champion.

Features

  • Eliminate the headaches of connecting to your robot. FTC's Wi-Fi and wireless Android Debug Bridge (ADB) connections are notoriously unreliable and difficult to use, but now with Sidekick you get:
    • A single button to connect to the robot via Wi-Fi and ADB;
    • Fewer dropped connections;
    • Easy and robust recovery when ADB hangs.
  • Monitor your robot's hardware as it runs. Graph the robot's real-time performance to inspect performance characteristics such as amperage draw, hub temperature, and CPU usage.
  • Record a wealth of data for offline analysis, automatically, with no setup by you. Context is essential for debugging and performance work. Without perturbing your robot's performance, Sidekick automatically records:
    • All your calls that interact with the hardware, including parameters and results.
    • All "bulk" data from an API call to a device that invokes a bulk read. (This enables "free" over-current warnings from motors, for example.)
    • The performance of your control loop and all hardware calls.
    • System performance including CPU utilization, CPU clock, and CPU temperature.
    • Thread performance.
    • All Logcat data.
    • telemetry.addValue(), addLine() and all other telemetry calls.
    • All Gamepad input.
    • The robot's configuration of devices.
    • All FTC Dashboard Canvas visualizations.
    • The Limelight camera stream, complete with visualizations.
    • The camera stream of regular cameras when ADB is connected. Sidekick records an MP4 of all visualizations that are output to the Robot Controller's "screen".
  • Benefit from automatic analysis. Dr. Roboto is a built-in mentor that diligently examines all recorded data and makes suggestions and points out errors and warnings. It addresses both performance and correctness and is based on years of real-life mentoring experience.
  • Enjoy intuitive analysis for humans. It loves to graph and make it easy to navigate and understand the data.
  • Extend its functionality. Use optional API calls to enable features such as run-time assertions and performance timing.
  • Back up your configuration. We've had our robot configuration wiped more than once. Now it's saved after every opMode and can be restored with a single button.

Sidekick is easy to install and use, and it's fast and robust. It works with Java, Kotlin, Blocks, and all FTC libraries.