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Subject: 
Re: How advanced can RCX programming be?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Mon, 10 Jan 2000 23:19:49 GMT
Viewed: 
467 times
  
On Mon, 10 Jan 2000, alex wetmore wrote:
From: "Matthew Miller" <mattdm@mattdm.org>
Tobias Möller <tobias.moller@telia.com> wrote:
I´ve heard that you can program the RCX in very advanced ways, • multitasking
and so on.
How advanced can it be?

Depends how hard you want to work. With LegOS or pbForth, which replace • the
official firmware, you can program the hardware at the machine level, so • you
can do very advanced stuff. With NQC (or RoboLab) you're still limited by
Lego's firmware, so it's not as powerful. (For example, with NQC, you're
limited to 32 variables.)

Even with the 32 variable limit I think that you can make programs which
exhibit pretty complex behaviors.  I plan to play with pbForth and LegOS
soon, but really haven't felt extremely limited with NQC yet.

I hate to see this about a toy I've had so much fun with, but it isn't
likely that (esp. once you upgrade to pbForth or legOS) you'll feel
limited by software, even with the 32K limitation. The big limitation is
hardware. The sensors (esp.  once you try to do anything with any kind of
precision) are an unreliable mess, and the fact that you can only use
three of them makes it difficult to do anything of any serious
computational complexity. Debugging is also practically impossible- the
hoops my class has had to jump through to get sophisticated programs
running are just unbelievable. That said, you can still do cool things-
but they will take lots of patience, and lots of mechanical ingenuity.
Software is just not going to be the problem, especially once you get a
real OS.
-Luis

#######################################################################

     Profanity is the one language that all programmers understand.
                  -Anonymous

#######################################################################



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: How advanced can RCX programming be?
 
From: "Luis Villa" <liv@duke.edu> (...) This is 100% true. When I first bought my RCX I bought two of them figuring that I'd use them in a master/slave configuration to do useful stuff with more then three sensors. I haven't had much time in my life (...) (24 years ago, 10-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: How advanced can RCX programming be?
 
From: "Matthew Miller" <mattdm@mattdm.org> (...) multitasking (...) the (...) you (...) Even with the 32 variable limit I think that you can make programs which exhibit pretty complex behaviors. I plan to play with pbForth and LegOS soon, but really (...) (24 years ago, 10-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics)

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