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Subject: 
pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
Date: 
Sat, 8 Jan 2000 08:35:30 GMT
Viewed: 
1317 times
  
So I've just been crawling over some broken glass, ERR, I mean, uploading
pbFORTH text files to the RCX!  It's hard to tell the difference!  At the
least, pbFORTH needs to:

1) accept \n, \r, \n\r or \r\n all as it does a single \r now.

2) have a mode to make it shut up during uploading.  the errors are going to be
lost anyway, and talking back just forces the terminal program to wait for long
enough for the longest possible error to be printed so that the IR from the RCX
doesn't clobber the next line.

Preferably it should have some kind of fast binary upload.

Overall, pbFORTH is remarkably unfriendly:

1)  Took me only 5 minutes to install the fw.

2)  Took 1 hour to figure out the terminal settings (was working from the
standard FW settings which have even parity).  Finally found it by searching
lugnet.

3) Took 5 minutes to get my first command, `hi', to execute.

4) Took 1 hour to get anything else to work, then I realized I needed RCX_INIT.

5) Took 5 minutes to write a test program.

6) Took 2 hours to write and test scripts to massage the textfiles and upload
them to the RCX.

I can see why pbFORTH isn't widespread!  It took me less time to get NQC
running than the standard Mindstorms software!  How is this easier than legOS?

--Ben



Message has 3 Replies:
  Re: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
 
(...) This, IMO, is the biggest problem with pbForth as it exists. Although I have no idea why, Ralph seems reluctant to take pbForth to that point at this time. (And it makes even less sense to me when I think about the idea that most of this (...) (25 years ago, 8-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)
  Re: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
 
Well, I can rather agree on the uploading, but I don't find it quite as bad as you do. Not as good as NQC, but then NQC still has all the LEGO firmware limitations. As for the rest of your comments, I can only say that I managed to get the (...) (25 years ago, 9-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)
  RE: pbFORTH needs better uploading, docs
 
Ben, Thanks for emailing and feeding back some important issues for the rest of the Mindstorms pbForth community. I'll always welcome comments and respond as quickly as possible... Let me address each point, sorry about the quoting, but it's needed (...) (25 years ago, 9-Jan-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)

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