Snake game running on the Driver Station

[sciencewhiz]

I used the new DriverStationDisplay API to make a snake game on the FIRST Driver Station. I ran it in simulation since I don't have a Systemcore.

I had a few goals. First I wanted to play with the DriverStationDisplay API, since it's new for WPILib 2027 Alpha 7. Second, I wanted to see how free Copilot would handle APIs that wasn't in it it's training data. DriverStationDisplay it didn't know anything about, while XboxController changed since the 2026 version that would be in it's training data. I've seen a lot hallucinations in completion, so I figured this would be a hard task for it.

I prompted it with the following, in agent mode with auto models:

Create a snake game that runs during telopPeriodic using the DriverStationDisplay class for output and the Dpad on the XboxController class for input

It asked for permission several times to inspect the local dependencies, so it figured out the APIs. After implementing the SW, it asked for permission to run a build, and it worked the first time. I did manually tweak it so the board was bigger (but it had set up the constants for that), and to clear the board on disabledInit. It only used 1% of my tokens for this, which was lower then I thought.

The code is at: https://github.com/sciencewhiz/SnakeDSDisplay

I think the next evolution would be to ask it to use the Commands V3 State Machine API, instead of the state machine it created.

[PeterJohnson]

Other ideas for improvement:

• Use ANSI color codes and/or the raw API to add color
• The raw API will also be faster (lines is rate-limited)
• Send a BEL character code when the snake dies

Note this also works in the simulation GUI (which has an integrated DS display implementation).

[blaze-developer]

Can it run doom?

[PeterJohnson]

It could with some work. It's a text display, so you'd need to use something like https://github.com/ludocode/doom-cli as a starting point, and then plumb the IO.