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Subject: 
RE: RCX & RIS, a fading glory?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Tue, 4 Feb 2003 16:35:57 GMT
Original-From: 
Andrew J. Huang <AJHUANG@VELOCITUS.NETihatespam>
Viewed: 
692 times
  
From: PeterBalch
[mailto:PeterBalch@compuserve.com]

You come home from the shop with your brand new • motor. You plug it into
your cpu "brick" and plug the cpu into your PC. • You select the PC menu
command New Hardware. The PC talks to the cpu, • the cpu talks to the bus and
asks everyone whose attached to identify • themselves. The PC sees the new
motor and says 'You've got a new "motor". What do • you want to call it'. You
take a felt-tip and write on the motor "XYZ" then • tell the PC 'It's called
"XYZ"'. From now on, the PC always refers to that • motor as XYZ. No-one need
ever see the long id number 2908347525.

This is fine for computer systems that change
infrequently, but for
lego that is intended to change often, it's not
ideal.  There is a linkage between the programming
and the specific motors or sensors.  If you take
your machine apart and then rebuild it later, the
same devices must be used in the same locations;
switching the original drive motor for an arm
would have serious functionality issues!

I think a graphical language is the ideal for • beginners and there is no
reason why such a language shouldn't have all the • power of a textual
language.

Although a picture is worth a thousand words, I
can change a few of the thousand words to get an
entirely different picture much faster than
drawing a new picture.  This is why a textual
programming language has much more power than a
graphical language - you can make changes on any
scale, from instructions to systems.  A graphical
language can only be changed at the
pre-manufactured components level.

-Andy



Message has 1 Reply:
  RE: RCX & RIS, a fading glory?
 
Andy, This won't happen if the Device_ID to Device_Friendly_Name mapping is as generic as "motor1", "motor2", "light1", "lightsensor1", "irdar1", "rotationsensor1", "rotationsensor2" and so on... Then, the *specific* Device_Friendly_Name to (...) (22 years ago, 4-Feb-03, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: RCX & RIS, a fading glory?
 
Kyle (...) Plug-And-Play works well under Windows (at least, it does under XP). The chip on the sensor or motor can say what it is - an ASCII string that says 'motor' or 'servo' - and who it is - a unique id like 2908347525. (...) The cpu "brick" (...) (22 years ago, 4-Feb-03, to lugnet.robotics)

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