Subject:
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Re: Got my NXT on Wednesday
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.org.us.smart
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Date:
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Mon, 10 Jul 2006 19:34:24 GMT
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Viewed:
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4368 times
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In lugnet.org.us.smart, Shane Brinkman-Davis wrote:
> If we have arrays, arrays of booleans doesn't seem like
> much of a stretch. I'm not asking for bit-wise Ands
> and Ors, Shirts or Rolls here ;).
Yeah, well,*I* am. There's already a Logical block that starts getting at
this, but bit-wise opertations would be very nice to have sometimes. I agree, if
we have arrays they should be arrays of anything (number, boolean, or string),
but making this a general block would likely make things even more bloated
(reference what John has said about unoptimised compilations and excess code).
> isn't something like 50% of their mindstorms customers
> adults?
While I'm reasonably certain that adults make up more than the cannonical
"5%" of Mindstorms sales, I suspect it's still far below 50%. Remember, the main
users of Mindstorms are educators. I know of one educator who just placed an
order for 22 (!) NXT sets, and I suspect he's just a drop in the bucket. Kids
are still a *major* driver of sales here.
> once you had a myblock with I/O, you can copy and past the
> little I/O symbols to make more of them. It is crude, but
> you can edit the I/O.
This results in another plug appearing internal to the MyBlock, but that plug
is not exposed in the datahub (so you can't wire values into it). It does seem
to show up in the configuration panel, so perhaps this is a "partially broken
feature" that might be functional in the future.
> The main problem at this point for me is how MyBlocks are
> shared across all programs.
Actually, there's a distinction here. MyBlocks are shared across a *profile*.
Switch profiles, and you switch MyBlock collections. This might be a better way
of organizing it than "some are local, some are global". Another alternative
would be not MyBlocks, but "packages" of code (they would need, in my opinion,
to look different, or further confusion will result).
As to 100's of one-off MyBlocks, yep, that could certainly be a problem, and
making *all* MyBlocks local (the same way all subroutines are local to a program
in a text-based language) is one solution. So is being careful on the making and
naming of MyBlocks.
> so far, I want them most just so I can decrease the clutter
> of the main screen.
Funny. I've used them almost exclusively the other way, very carefully trying
to craft MyBlocks like Modulo, trig functions, or very specific translations of
sensor data. the result is almost all of the MyBlocks I've made are very
general. But I can clearly see you point here.
> I haven't tested yet, but I'm also worried about editing
> one of these MyBlocks after the fact and accidentally
> messing up the program that originally needed
> it...
Yep, that can be a problem (& as John said, they are absolutely NOT stored
with the program). A solution is to only operate on cloned MyBlocks. Open the
MyBlock you want to work on, and save it under a new name. Now go to work on the
new clone, and nothing should break in earlier programs.
> I think it is pretty funny that a screen-shot of the program
> is 1/8th (100k vs 800k) the size of the save-file of that
> program.
I think it's pretty dang confusing. I'm still trying to figure out how I've
generated enough information to end up eatting multi-Mb amounts of memory to
save the files, when the graphical display plus a simple text description of
what I've set in configuration panels would take up far, faaar less.
--
Brian Davis
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Got my NXT on Wednesday
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| (...) I don't know how accurate the big wired article on NXT was, but it says pretty clearly it is 50/50 adults and kids. "Such loyalty isn't unusual among the fanboys who've swooned over Mindstorms since its 1998 debut. Four years after its (...) (18 years ago, 10-Jul-06, to lugnet.org.us.smart)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Got my NXT on Wednesday
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| (...) Well, they already have a boolean data type. If we have arrays, arrays of booleans doesn't seem like much of a stretch. I'm not asking for bit-wise Ands and Ors, Shirts or Rolls here ;). (but isn't something like 50% of their mindstorms (...) (18 years ago, 10-Jul-06, to lugnet.org.us.smart)
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