iota is a small, lightweight abstraction over the default WPILib functions for handling joystick inputs, and extends its functionality to any kind of input, whether through SmartDashboard, joystick, or sensor. Any value that can be polled can be handled by iota.

Furthermore, iota provides an elegant, simplistic pipeline implementation in which reusable steps can be chained together. Often, inputs are not directly applied to motor speeds; they are modified somehow. With iota, this occurs by passing the input through a pipeline and then running a callback with the resulting, transformed input.

Notes on the name.

iota started out simply named io. However, this conflicts with io, which is a Python core library, so trying to import io would implement the core library instead of what is actually wanted. The word "iota" contains "io", means "a very small amount" (the main code, iota.py, is only 72 SLOC uncommented), and is pretty easy to type (being 4 letters long), so I just decided to name it that.

Notes on the language

iota, like all the other code written by FRC Team 5002 from the 2017-2018 season onwards, is written in Python. In fact, iota was a major reason why we switched from Java to Python; Python allowed us much more flexibility with its dynamic typing and tuples than Java ever could. In fact, just the pipeline implementation in Java was already longer than the entire iota in Python, and heavily generics-based and unreadable. With Python, "it just works".

Notes on the usage

Most detailed information on the usage of iota can be found in this documentation. This is only meant as a quick overview.

iota is used by constructing a pipeline and adding it to the poller. For example,

from iota import *
pipe = Pipeline()
pipe.add(lambda x : not x, float)
Poller.on(gamepad1.x, Events.PRESSED, pipe, setServoSpeed)

where gamepad1.x is a function that returns the value of x, Events.PRESSED is an enum value telling the poller to only run the pipeline when a PRESSED action has been detected, pipe is the pipeline of steps, and setServoSpeed is an example callback that actually applies the changes to the hardware.

More information can be found in documentation.