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Subject: 
Re: Frustration with NXT-G 1.1
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Wed, 14 May 2008 02:18:23 GMT
Original-From: 
Doug Wilcox <doug.wilcox@!avoidspam!wordsmithdigital.com>
Viewed: 
6684 times
  
This was about as cool as the year she gave me the 3,104-piece Lego Star
Destroyer. (Especially since, when people see it in my cube, they usually
remark, "My wife/girlfriend _won't_ let me get this.)

Nichelle laughed at your remark.

--Doug Wilcox
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Davis" <brdavis@iusb.edu>
To: <lego-robotics@crynwr.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 16:37
Subject: Re: Frustration with NXT-G 1.1


In lugnet.robotics, "Doug Wilcox" wrote:

I was thrilled when my wife presented me with an NXT for
our anniversary...

Please let your wife know that she has *really* cool tastes in anniversary
gifts
:).

At first glance, it appeared that the NXT-G was
wonderful...

I still like it quite a bit, but it seems among adults I'm a minority (or
an
aberration... I've been called worse). I agree that the bugs in the IDE in
particular can drive you crazy, and it takes me longer to do some things
graphically than I could in a text editor. Like you, if I compare NXT-G to
something like RIS I shudder at the second - NXT-G is a quantum step
forward,
but still behind in some ways for power users.

My primary interest was in determining whether it
would be easier to teach my kids NXT-G or NXC.

That depends. Are you trying to teach your kids how to think in C or a
C-like
language, or are you trying to teach them how to acquire new skills? For
the
former, I'd suggest RobotC (for a number of reasons, the main downsides
being
cost and that it's not open platform). I'd probably be using RobotC myself
if it
was available on a Mac (closer to C, and more importantly for me more
powerful
and *much* faster than other options based on the stock firmware).

For example, see this image...

What's happened there is that sequence beams within the multi-state Switch
have
become corrupted. The best way I know to fix that is to rip out the block
sequences within each state of the Switch (saving them somewhere else on
the
worksheet for later), and then tearing out the corrupted Switch, replacing
it
with a new one, and then selecting and dragging the sequences back into
the
proper cases of the Switch. I agree, this isn't at all ideal. I'm not sure
why
that happens (or why it doesn't seem to happen to me), but it *is* very
annoying.

Note that here I suspect part of the problem is you are trying to use a
Switch
when there's little reason. For instance, for each case you need to move
the "B"
motor a different distance, correct? It might be far better to calculate
(or
even use a simple look-up table) to determine those distance, and then
*wire*
the result into the Motor B blocks. This sort of thing (working with the
strengths of NXT-G, instead of forcing on its weaknesses) is one of the
things I
must admit I really like - it's a thinking puzzle for me (and for those of
you
who think that's not a part of the MINDSTORMS product, consider that we
all keep
trying to build industrial and innovative autonomous robots... with a
childs toy
:) ).

--
Brian "Wanted: RobotC for OSX" Davis



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Frustration with NXT-G 1.1
 
(...) Please let your wife know that she has *really* cool tastes in anniversary gifts :). (...) I still like it quite a bit, but it seems among adults I'm a minority (or an aberration... I've been called worse). I agree that the bugs in the IDE in (...) (17 years ago, 13-May-08, to lugnet.robotics)

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