Simulated Time
In the simulated environment, time advances only at the pace that the simulator
is run and in cooperation with the controller code (such as the code controlling
your robot). As a result, using time.time to know how long your robot has been
running for or time.sleep to wait for some duration will have unpredictable
results, especially when run on a computer other than the one you are developing
on (such as during the competition).
Instead your code should explicitly signal to the simulator when it is ready for time to advance and should query for the current time from the simulator. This can be done by using the methods detailed below.
R.sleep
occasionally (even a very small value will allow the simulator to progress).
Sleeping
If you want to wait for something to happen within the simulation, and you can
be reasonably confident that it will take a given amount of time, you can use
sleep method on your robot to pause your code for a given duration.
Internally this uses the simulation’s own clock and so is suitable for use in
place of time.sleep. Note that, just as with time.sleep, while your code is
sleeping your robot will continue any actions it was doing.
# Blink the output
R.ruggeduinos[0].digital_write(A_PIN, 1)
R.sleep(1.5) # Sleep for a second and a half of simulation time
R.ruggeduinos[0].digital_write(A_PIN, 0)
Getting the current time
If you need to measure the time since some previous moment within the simulator,
your robot has a time method which can be used in place of time.time to get
a number (in seconds) that increases in line with simulation time.
Time zero as returned by this method is the point at which the simulation began, however you should not rely on that being a useful reference point as it may not be the moment at which the match began.
then = R.time()
# .. do some other things ..
now = R.time()
duration = now - then