Robotics : 18970


Robotics / 18970

RE: RCX simulator ? —Russ Sprouse

Wow - can you imagine if the simulator could be hooked up with MLCad and LDraw? Then you could build a robot with a complex structure, program it, and have it run around a virtual world, all rendered with POV-Ray! Man, who need reality after that? (...) (22 years ago, 13-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Stef Mientki

(...) That would be greee...eeeat indeed, But I was thinking of something less complicated ;-) Stef Mientki (22 years ago, 13-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

(...) Woaaahhhh there - just one moment - that's a *REALLY* big step from where we are. OK - so I buy the idea of an RCX simulator. * You could write one that emulated the RCX at the Lego Byte-Code level. That's really easy - I could do it in a (...) (22 years ago, 13-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Stef Mientki

hi Steve, (...) I expect that it would cost me at least a few weeks of my spare time, so if you've a few hours of spare time, ... I would be much obliged ;-) cheers, Stef Mientki (22 years ago, 14-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

(...) OK - I'll do it if nobody else has - but I kinda thought it had already been done. There are a few things I need: 1) The format of the byte-code files that NQC and the Lego tools use to save byte-code in. Are they the same - or are there two (...) (22 years ago, 14-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

(...) OK - I just did some searching and it looks like David Baum (author of NQC amongst other things) has already done this: (URL) I don't think I'll be taking the time to duplicate his efforts! According to his notes, David hasn't released a new (...) (22 years ago, 14-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Stef Mientki

(...) A few hours + a few evenings = 2 hours + 2 * 4 hours = 10 hours. Total code size (including documentation) = 74,000 characters. That's an average keystrokes/minute of (74,000 / (10*60))= 123 keystrokes/minute. I think that's very fast, ..... (...) (22 years ago, 14-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

(...) You are making the serious mistake of equating number of characters in the file with number of keystrokes taken to create it. The project I'm doing at work is up to about 60Mb of source code. Does that mean I've typed 60 million keystrokes in (...) (22 years ago, 14-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Dave Baum

(...) I stopped working on it because there wasn't much demand. I never intended to write a full-blown simulation environment. I hoped other people would write appropriate front ends (GUIs that might let you interact with the RCX's sensors, or (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

Dave Baum wrote: > I hoped other (...) That's clearly the next step - the question is - does anyone want it badly enough to do it? Personally, I'd rather just run my programs on the real RCX. It seems to me that RCX programs are generally simple (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Stef Mientki

hi Dave, (...) I see your simulator every half year, searching the web for one. But maybe I'm very stupid, everytime I download the sources (all there is) and then I don't know what to do with them (my computer doesn't know either). Because I've a (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Trevyn Watson

Dave wrote it in Java, so youll need the Java Runtime Envrionment. You can find it at (URL) installing that, you need to unzip everything in the zip file from Dave to one folder. After that, I'm not sure how to proceed. (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Dave Baum

(...) You should be able to compile and run the files on a Windows computer. Even though Micrsoft would like to kill Java, Sun keeps shipping Windows tools and runtime environments for Windows. I wrote the simulator in Java specifically so it (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

(...) As someone who uses an operating system that has 80% of the OpenSource developers, I think I can explain how you can get this software to work even on a system with hopelessly inadequate OpenSource support. :-) ...If you use the (free!) Cygwin (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Stef Mientki

(...) I cann't disagree with you, ... but I live in an surrounding where even 99% is using this M$-OS. And I'm just too simple to get Linux working ;-( I'm not a software programmer, and learning one computer language was difficult enough for me. (...) (22 years ago, 15-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Thomas Schweitzer

Hi all! (...) We don't need to simulate all of the mechanics because we've got the real thing. What about remote controlling the complete robot with the brain inside your PC? In the case of simulation we could degrade the RCX to a stupid IO device. (...) (22 years ago, 16-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Andy Gombos

Since when can Pov ray render an image of any useful size in realtime, or something approaching realtime? I haven't tested on my XP1600+, but my Duron 800 took a few seconds to render a 640 x 480 image - the minimum I consider useful for determining (...) (22 years ago, 13-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)

Re: RCX simulator ? —Steve Baker

(...) Yes - it's using ray-traced rendering to get good realism. However, these days you could do pictrures that are nearly as good with fancy OpenGL rendering in realtime. A modern 3D graphics card can easily draw at least a hundred thousand (...) (22 years ago, 14-Sep-02, to lugnet.robotics)