History

In the fall of 2014, FRC Team 4931 was getting ready for their second competition season. Their rookie year was a lot of work, but the programming team decided that for the upcoming season they wanted to do far more testing of their code. After looking at different approaches, they decided that they wanted an abstraction layer to hide as much detail as possible about the underlying hardware. Thus, the ideas behind Strongback were born, and the team worked very hard that season to make off-robot testing a reality.

At the end of the 2015 season, the lead programmer and one of the mentors presented their work at the 2015 FIRST World Championships Conference. During the conference, they offered to open source their framework so other teams could use it. Not only did many teams like the idea, quite a few offered to help. So later that summer, Team 4931 extracted the code from their 2014 codebase, made some improvements, and created the Strongback open source project.