Hello world! This is my first topic on this forum!
I am Mr. Harrington, assistant coach for the Bancroft Robodogs, team 2442, and a prolific author of open source robotics software. I was asked in another post on AI for vex robots to post about BowlerStudio as a general topic, so here we go!
Over the last 10 years i have been working on a robotics IDE called BowlerStudio. This piece of free, open source software is a tool for CAD modeling, programming and physics simulation of your modeled robot. BowlerStudio can be installed on Linux, MacOS (arm and x86) and Windows (x86 only).
As part of a class on kinematics and simulation I taught to my Juniors last year, I created a simulation of the High Stakes field and all of the field objects. The simulation has accurate masses, features all of the convex contours, and allows you to run a simulation of your robot in the physics environment. The CAD engine lets you build your CAD for your robot without any restrictions, and uses the face that the CAD is already in BowlerStudio to generate all of the physics parameters automatically (Motor torque, friction, mass, center of mass) . I made a simple demo robot with impossible part placements so no one can just use that design, this is a High School competition after all.
To install BowlerStudio on Linux/MacOS/Windows you can go here: https://commonwealthrobotics.com/
To run the example Vex robot, fork this: GitHub - madhephaestus/VexVitaminsRobot: Project VexVitaminsRobot repo and open VexVitaminsRobot.xml in BowlerStudio, then run it.
To add the field elements use this repo in the physics engine: GitHub - madhephaestus/VexHighStakes2024: Field and elements for Vex High Stakes and select fieldElements.groovy for the moving objects and field.groovy for the static objects. If there is interest I am happy to answer questions here about how to use this tool and how to CAD your robot in it.