hello

[Spiked3]

Just wanted to say hello. I have just built my robonova and this is my first venture into these robot things. I have been around servos, like forever it seems. I fly RC helicopters, including inverted hovering etc, so you know I have a collection of RC parts and experience building these kinds of toys.

The robonova went together well. I figured out a few of the manual errors on my own and it ran pretty well on first powerup. It took me a little while to get a handle on what was going on with the code downloading, IR control etc. Once I did my second servo zeroing, it performs all the supplied motions without falling and I was thrilled.

I just installed a PG-03 gyro, and it too is working well.

So anyhow, I got this thing to give me something to do thinking I would have a bunch of things to debug and fix, and so far nothing! Everything is working great, including robobasic 2.72 running on Windows7 (on bootcamp on mac book pro) and I have started doing some of my own moves in Robobasic.

I should mention I have 30 years of experience as a software developer, so that aspect was no problem at all.

Anyhow - I wanted to say HUGE THANKS to all the contributors to this site, and the site itself. I am looking forward to finding something that takes more time

My web site is at http://www.spiked3.com and I have some newbie stuff posted there. I will keep it updated as I do new things.

[Gort]

Are you a beta tester for Windows 7? How hard was it to get the compiler to work on the new OS?

[Spiked3]

I am only a beta tester in the sense that Microsoft had an open beta for Win7 and anyone could download it. At the time my only laptop was a new mac book pro, and so I loaded it on the Mac with bootcamp (the system that allows Macs to run both OSX and Windows).

I had to run the OCX re-register commands listed in the 'getting Robobasic to run on Vista' threads. You need to run the commands as an administrator. Once I ran those, Robobasic ran fine. I will relist the commands here for convenience. I have gotten a new PC laptop with Vista since then, and the same procedure worked on it as well.

regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\mscomm32.ocx
regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\COMCT332.ocx
regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\MSCOMCTL.ocx
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\mscomm32.ocx
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\COMCT332.ocx
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\MSCOMCTL.ocx

regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\COMDLG32.ocx
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\COMDLG32.ocx

regsvr32 /u c:\windows\system32\MSINET.ocx
regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\MSINET.ocx

[Gort]

It would be easy for Hitec to fix the problem. All they need to do is compile Robobasic 2.72 as a VB.net application. Right now it is a VB 6 application and Vista and Windows7 do not support it.

[Spiked3]

Actually moving from VB6 to vb.net is not always easy. And really not needed in this case, I cant see where there would much gained. The problem is in the way the installer installs the OCX files. It's a byproduct of using the old installer from the vb6 days. All they really need to do is update the installation program, but again, the work around is easy enough.

Who knows? Perhaps hopefully someone is working on implementing a Microsoft compatible system. From what I looked at it, the MS Robot concurrent services model seems like the way to go to me. Move the thinking to a big horsepower machine wirelessly.

There is not enough brain on the little guy to do anything too fancy and robobasic as is serves it well for the simple stuff IMHO.