Subject:
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My Control Lab Lives!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.ca.rtltoronto
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Date:
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Sat, 25 Oct 2003 21:46:30 GMT
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Viewed:
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717 times
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To all the CL owners out there...
Yay! The latest version of Robolab provides full support for the CL. For those
who may not know, Robolab is the educational version of Mindstorms, and offers a
more powerful programming environment. You string together graphical objects
much like the RIS software, but its much more sophisticated. It takes some
getting used to. I still prefer NQC.
That was the good news. Now for the bad news. I was surprised at how slow the
Control Lab's response time is. My first program involved running a motor and
flipping the direction a couple of times. I noticed there seemed to be a bit of
a delay at the end before shutting the motor off. So then I hooked up a rotation
sensor directly to the motor to test the sampling rate. At first I tried to
start the motor and stop it after half a turn. Yeah right. This was not possible
at full speed. I had to run the motor at the lowest speed for this to work. Then
I hooked up another rotation sensor to the motor, and connected it to an RCX. I
then wrote a simple program to run the motor from the CL for 2 seconds. The RCX
registered 236 counts, while the Contol Lab only registered 31. Wow. Thats
awful. I am so disappointed. You would think one of the major benefits of the CL
is the extra speed provided by your computer. As it turns out, the serial
connection seems to be a huge bottleneck in the system. Crap.
I wonder if the activeX control might be faster? I was not able to get it to
work. Each time I tried to run a simple Visual Basic program that used the
control, it would hang. Apparently Ivan had the same problems. Could those of
you who are computer programmers look into this? Derek? I would like to compare
the activeX control with Robolab and see if there is any improvement. If not, Oh
well. I guess I will just have to live with the slowness. Anyone want to convert
the control lab to USB? :)
Rob
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