advice about what programming lanquage to study up on

[weebaldy]

hi all

I have "almost" made my decision about my first bot ( probably a RN). i come from an engineering background but have only dabbled years ago in basic. I would like to develop my programming skills and was wondering if C+ or VB programming study would help in this new hobby.

I have had a look at Robobasic and I know it will take me some time to get to grips with even the "basics" of that but would like to study a bit more in depth so any advice of which path to take is much appreciated.

thanks again

Ray

[logicerror]

Robobasic is BASIC. I mean all the standard keywords, if, then, else, for, next, gosub, goto and others.. The only difference is that Robobasic contains some functions for working with the controller itself, like switching on and off the LED, moving the servos, reading the AD ports etc, so learning C++ wouldn't do much here. KHR and other robot's i've seen aren't programmable at all!! All you have is a block-scheme of motions, and you can assign them to buttons on your remote controller.. Well that's what the standard software packages consists of..

I also had some practice with Hitech's MaVIN, that little car. Same old block-schemes, AND you could look at C source code, but you couldn't modify it, there was a message that said under construction. Maybe they've made it working now, hell knows, tried it about two months ago.

[Robo1]

C always a good language to learn most chips can be programmed in it and it will teach you a lot about how to control the hardware like watch dogs and interrupts. Learning basic wouldn't hurt, programming is programming after all the more languages you know the easier it is to learn new ones. But every one has there favorite. I love java shame it so slow if only there was a good compiler that could compile ro source instead of just in time.

Bren

[weebaldy]

thanks for the advice guys, much appreciated. I think i will look for a good c+ learning kit.

cheers

Ray

[NovaOne]

BASIC was what sold the RN-1 to me, because the learning curve was not as steep. RoboBASIC is simpler, and a world away from VB. Although it won't do any harm learning VB, in fact I've use VB to serially communicate with RN quite a bit.

I've only ever written simple C programs. However it is most common language for embedded microcontroller systems. So you can't go wrong learning C either, and it could even lead you on to learning C#. I'm not saying object oriented programming is necessary in this hobby but I think in the long term learning a common object oriented language would be a good idea. So far, I regret not doing this may self.

Chris

[Humanoido]

I've written code in some 78 or so versions and dialects of various programming languages including C, C++, VB, etc. Since you mention a Robonova-1, I would recommend early standardized versions of BASIC, to quickly get up to par with RoboBASIC. Most microcontroller BASICS have specific subsets of motion control statements, so you'll gain lots of good experience by actually running through examples and doing real time coding with the specific language. Visual Basic won't help as much because it's written for other applications in mind not directly related to motion control and specific microncontrollers. Of course, you can use it, and nearly any language and make it work for various applications (more or less), so there's a personal flavor involved in programming that most people prefer.

Another language you may want to look at is PBasic, as it too is microcontroller related and contains many of the original Dartmouth BASIC statements.

http://www.parallax.com/

Your best bet is to work through some examples from the RoboBASIC manual that comes with your Robonova-1. The main challenge is lack of any display, however, the LED and speaker are very useful for debugging and writing some simple test programs.

humanoido