Add buildRobot and buildSim task

[ThadHouse]

Many people misunderstand gradle. build builds EVERYTHING. The way to build just what gets deployed is difficult. We should add buildRobot and buildSim commands to make this a bit more obvious.

[Darcy-Meago]

I have been experimenting using a build server as a means to deploy to the robot quickly, as our C++ build times seem to be longer the larger our project gets. Variability in student laptops can also significantly impact build times as well, typically 10 -15 minutes per build. Community based teams cannot usually provide each student with a dedicated machine. Some students are also hardware locked by school provided equipment.

Before we deploy, we build using the following: “gradlew frcUserProgramLinuxathenaReleaseExecutable” not the full “build”.

With a second hand server we can do a full build in 30 to 40 seconds flat consistently from anywhere provided a weak internet connection. The build server is just Ubuntu Desktop with the standard build environment for Linux provided by WPILib of course.

Gradle is beyond my experience and the issue I have run into is when the built project is copied back to the students machine to deploy, it is detecting a stale build and re-builds, 10 to 15 minutes later we deploy.

During the official build season it would also be great to offload the heavy lifting so laptops are not trying to build in 40-45C ambient.

The build server typically uses ~29GB to build our 2025 project. Half of student laptops are 8GB the other half 16GB. (Yes I am aware WPILib says 32GB is the minimum for C++ teams.)

A command that would allow us to deploy without checking to re-build would be awesome.
I have no idea if this is something that can easily be implemented or not.

So, I guess this is really more of a feature request, but I’m not sure where else to put it.