vexide

Open-source Rust runtime for VEX robots. vexide provides a safe and efficient set of APIs and tools for programming VEX robots in Rust!

Getting Started

To start using vexide, we recommend going through our docs, which contain step-by-step instructions for setting up a development environment using vexide-template and tutorials for many of vexide's common features. You can also use our examples as a reference for your own projects.

Project Structure

vexide's codebase is a fairly standard rust workspace split into 5 crates:

• vexide-core implements common low-level system APIs, including competition control, OS facilities, and backtrace collection.
• vexide-devices contains APIs for VEX peripherals and hardware, allowing you to control motors and sensors from Rust code.
• vexide-async implements vexide's async executor and runtime, as well as a few common futures and synchronization primitives.
• vexide-startup contains bare-metal runtime initialization code for booting a freestanding vexide program on a V5 brain.
• vexide-macro implements vexide's proc-macros, including the #[vexide::main] attribute.

All of these crates are re-exported from the vexide crate to be used as a single package.

Building

vexide relies on some features that are only available in Rust’s nightly release channel, so you’ll need to switch to using nightly to build it. We also use the rust-src component due to our target not shipping pre-built versions of the standard library in rustup.

rustup override set nightly
rustup component add rust-src

If you want to run your programs on the V5 brain, you'll additionally need to install our upload tool, cargo-v5. It extends the normal cargo build command, converting executables to a compatible format and sending them over a wired or wireless connection.

You can install that tool with the following command:

cargo install cargo-v5

From there, the project can be built like any other Rust library using cargo v5:

cargo v5 build -p vexide

Examples can similarly be built this way:

cargo v5 build --example basic --release

[!NOTE] Installing cargo-v5 isn't needed if you just want to test if your changes compile. vexide supports compiling to host targets using a mocked version of the VEX SDK for testing changes without a Brain. If you want to upload programs/examples or build a program for the Brain, you will need cargo-v5.

Testing

When making changes to vexide, it's a good idea to test them. vexide supports Rust's testing features for verifying that code behaves how it should. You can test vexide using cargo test, like any other Rust project:

cargo test --all

Unit & doc tests always run directly on your computer using an incomplete stubbed SDK, so they'll likely miss some types of logic errors. We also recommend running some of our examples on real hardware.

cargo v5 upload --example basic --release

Depending on what you have changed, the basic example may not be the best example to test. We have many examples covering different parts of vexide, so choose the one that applies to your changes. If there isn't one, feel free to add it!