ntcore-ts

TypeScript and React libraries for WPILib's NetworkTables 4.1 protocol, plus an optional MCP server for agent tooling.

Live subscribe/publish dashboard (apps/example-react) talking to apps/example-robot over NT 4.1. Try it locally: start the robot (npm run serve -w @ntcore-ts/example-robot), then the dashboard (npm run serve -w @ntcore-ts/example-react).

• NodeJS and DOM support
• Togglable auto-reconnect
• Callbacks for new data on subscriptions
• Callbacks for connection listeners
• Wildcard prefix listeners for multiple topics
• Protobuf support with optional type generation and Zod validation
• Struct support for WPILib types (getStructTopic(name, Pose2d), useStructTopic(name, Pose2d))
• Retrying for messages queued during a connection loss
• On-the-fly server switching with resubscribing and republishing
• Generic types for Topics
• Client-side data validation using Zod
• Server-matching timestamping using RTT calculation
• Granular logging with configurable log levels per module
• MCP server (@ntcore-ts/mcp) for agent live NT introspection with gated writes

The client can decode about 1 million NT frames per second. React useTopic applies about 87 thousand updates per second. A 50-widget dashboard, all updating in one React batch, still does about 3,800 full refreshes per second.

Typical FRC traffic is tens to low thousands of updates per second. The network and NT server saturate first.

xychart-beta
    title "Client messages per second (Apple M1 Pro)"
    x-axis ["1 msg/frame", "10 msg/frame", "100 msg/frame"]
    y-axis "thousands of messages/s" 0 --> 1800
    bar [1006, 1643, 1740]

xychart-beta
    title "React hook updates per second (jsdom, Apple M1 Pro)"
    x-axis ["useTopic", "usePrefixTopic", "50 hooks batched"]
    y-axis "updates/s" 0 --> 90000
    bar [87400, 88100, 3800]

Numbers are from npm run bench on an Apple M1 Pro, Node 24. CI re-runs the same suite on every PR and fails if throughput drops to half of main. Details: performance guide.

Guides and API reference: https://ntcore.chrislawson.dev

npm install --save @ntcore-ts/client

React dashboards:

npm install @ntcore-ts/react @ntcore-ts/client react react-dom

MCP (Cursor / Claude Desktop):

npm install -g @ntcore-ts/mcp
# or: npx ntcore-ts-mcp

See the MCP guide (or packages/mcp/README.md) for mcp.json examples and write-gate env vars.

import { NetworkTables } from '@ntcore-ts/client';

const ntcore = NetworkTables.getInstanceByTeam(973);
const gyro = ntcore.getDoubleTopic('/MyTable/Gyro');
gyro.subscribe((value) => console.log(value));

More detail: Getting started and the React guide.

Contributions are welcome. See CONTRIBUTING.md for setup and PR guidelines.