ThunderAuto

ThunderAuto is a tool used by FRC teams to create efficient trajectories for autonomous robots to follow. Big changes are in development for the 2026 season, so stay tuned!

Building

ThunderAuto uses CMake as its primary build system. You do not need to install any third-party libraries to build or run ThunderAuto, as it fetches all dependencies automatically at compile time and links statically (in release builds).

Configuration:

Available options:

• THUNDERAUTO_DIRECTX11=<ON/OFF>
  • On Windows, set the graphics backend to DirectX 11 (default on Windows).
• THUNDERAUTO_OPENGL=<ON/OFF>
  • Set the graphics backend to OpenGL (default on macOS+Linux).
• THUNDERLIB_DIR="/path/to/ThunderLib/"
  • Instead of fetching the latest version of ThunderLib at compile time, specify a local directory where ThunderLib is located (this is useful for simultaneous development of ThunderAuto and ThunderLib).

Generators:

• Windows: Visual Studio 17 2022 is recommended.
• macOS: Xcode is required.
• Linux: Use whatever you like.

Here's an example configuration command for a Windows release build using DirectX 11:

cmake . -Bbuild -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release \
  -DTHUNDER_AUTO_DIRECTX11=ON -G"Visual Studio 17 2022"

Compilation:

You may build the executable with CMake or manually with the generator specified in the configuration step.

cmake --build build

It's not a bad idea to build with multiple threads by adding the flag --parallel 8 (if you have 8 cores).

Cross-Compilation for Windows:

As Windows is the primary platform for ThunderAuto users, Windows-specific features need to be regularly tested during development. For macOS and Linux developers, instead of setting up a Windows virtual machine, it is often easier to cross-compile ThunderAuto for Windows using a tool like mingw-w64. The built executable can be run using Wine.

Note

Cross-compilation and Wine emulation are helpful for testing some Windows-specific features, but using a Windows virtual machine is going to work better most of the time.

Developers on macOS or Linux can cross-compile ThunderAuto for Windows with a similar configuration command:

Here's an example configuration command for a Windows x86_64 debug build using OpenGL on macOS using mingw-64 installed via Homebrew:

cmake . -Bbuild \
  -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug \
  -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_NAME=Windows \
  -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_VERSION=10.0 \
  -DCMAKE_SYSTEM_PROCESSOR=x86_64 \
  -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc \
  -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER=/opt/homebrew/bin/x86_64-w64-mingw32-g++ \
  -DTHUNDER_AUTO_OPENGL=ON \
  -DTHUNDER_AUTO_WINDOWS_TEST_OPENGL_MACOS=ON \
  -G"Unix Makefiles"

Note

On macOS when cross-compiling with OpenGL, if the built executable is intended to be run using Wine on macOS, it is required to add the -DTHUNDER_AUTO_WINDOWS_TEST_OPENGL_MACOS=ON option to the configuration command. This will ensure that ThunderAuto is built with the correct OpenGL initialization for macOS.

Build the executable normally with CMake:

cmake --build build

To run the built executable using Wine, you can use a similar command:

WINEPATH=/opt/homebrew/opt/mingw-w64/toolchain-x86_64/x86_64-w64-mingw32/bin/ \
  wine64 build/ThunderAuto.exe