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 Robotics / RCX / pbFORTH / 276
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Subject: 
Re: The pain of communicating with the RCX
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth
Date: 
Fri, 10 Mar 2000 14:55:56 GMT
Viewed: 
1706 times
  
On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 09:04:26PM +0000, Ralph Hempel wrote:

[...On a TCL program to communicate with the RCX...]
I stopped supporting it late last year because it only worked under Windows
and I wanted a cross-platform tool. Now I have Linux on my laptop and Win98
too. I bought an old Mac6100 to try the mac platform as well.

Basically, it grabs an srec file and makes a .img (true binary) file. It then
does the upload thing to the RCX. After that, it's also a terminal that lets
you talk to the RCX.

Uploading srec files has been without problem for me; it's uploading text
that's painful. Does your program uses some protocol (XMODEM springs to
mind) for this, too?

To make it really useful, I need to add a macro capability to translate
common words into constants, and add a little XMODEM protocol. Since the

Why the macros? To speed downloading?

original XMODEM checksum is easy to do on the RCX, an advanced scripting
language should be up to the task, right?
I only ever used tcl for building a GUI (+tk) and that was some years ago, so
I'm not going to venture any opinions on how easy it is to build a
communication program with it.  Especially not if it is intended to be
crossplatform.

Ah, but I don't have Windows and I'm not going to install it. Not even for
pbforth's sake:-)

I don't blame you. How are you finding pbForth developemnt otherwise? I'm

Just two things spring to mind:
I patched RCX_EMIT to echo \r as \r\n when RCX_ECHO is 2. Why isn't
something like this in the original code? I read something in the history of
this newsgroup about ANS-forth objecting to it, but the only thing I can
find is that ANS-forth says that end-of-line is implementation defined?

I once made a typo and had the whole RAM written to my screen, without
being able to abort the operation. It would be nice if pressing one of the
buttons on the RCX would do a QUIT. Maybe a cold restart is better in the
case of multiple tasks. Any ideas on how to do such a thing?

thinking of adding a direct link to the ROM math routines to improve the
math speed, as well as releasing the servo driver....
16 or 32 bit math? Or both?
I'm playing with the idea to write an assembler for pbforth. Not that I
really need one, but it's nice to show off:-)

Ernst

--
Ernst de Ridder - hnridder@informatik.uni-rostock.de
Universitaet Rostock - Lehrstuhl fuer Theoretische Informatik
Albert Einstein Str. 21 - D-18051 Rostock - Germany
http://wwwteo.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~hnridder



Message has 1 Reply:
  RE: The pain of communicating with the RCX
 
(...) That's because the SREC upload uses the native upload code in the RCX ROM. It works really well but has to send each byte as a pair with the bits inverted. Also the header and trailer have to be added. The result is that it would be impossible (...) (25 years ago, 10-Mar-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)

Message is in Reply To:
  RE: The pain of communicating with the RCX
 
(...) Depends on which side of the fence you are on... (...) Hmmm. This is not good. I have ghad very good success with CRT, but I'm going to try a more general solution with Tcl. (...) I stopped supporting it late last year because it only worked (...) (25 years ago, 9-Mar-00, to lugnet.robotics.rcx.pbforth)

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