Honestly, ROBOTC is Mega awesome. It's really to Die for. I think some appreciation is overDue. I can't wait for next week

Why, what's next week?

Guess Also, I have no direct knowledge of this.

Ohhhh, I get it. Just had to see the topic title twice (EDIT: Oh. Now I've noticed that your entire post has Arduino names in it. Even more). I, too can't wait!

ROBOTC for Arduino has been a long time coming. Did you guys not take part in the testing a little while back? It was a bit of a public Alpha program. In any case, it's very nice.

I wrote about it here:

• http://botbench.com/blog/2010/11/16/robotc-for-arduino-wants-you/
• http://botbench.com/blog/2010/11/21/frankenfollower/
• http://botbench.com/blog/2010/12/28/fun-with-robotc-for-arduino/
• http://botbench.com/blog/2011/02/20/bit-banged-i2c-master-on-robotc-for-arduino/

The debugging feature is fantastic, of course. You can use multi-tasking; I believe it was 4 on the Uno and 6 or 8 on the Mega. Unfortunately, I don't have the installers any more for the alpha builds. They've been lost in time and in any case, they're old, so most likely not accurate any more in terms of capabilities.

Regards,
Xander

Well, frankly, I hadn't even heard of RobotC or the Arduino until about 3/4 of a year ago (and didn't even get RobotC until about half).



I actually don't have a Arduino. How easy do you think it would be to use a standard 328P micro with this software? I was planning on putting the Arduino bootloader on the ATMega 328P chip in the Pololu 3Pi, as I'm finding the AVR Studio software, and standard C-code, a bit hard to understand. So, does it have to be Arduino, or just Arduino firmware?

EDIT: I forgot to mention that before I got RobotC, I hadn't even touched any other programming software than NXT-G and RCX-Code. Now I'm learning Javascript, HTML5, Java(a bit), C#, and maybe soon Ruby and Python. I currently know: PBASIC (gotta love the Boe-Bot!), RobotC, and I suspect that if I tried to use NXC now, it wouldn't be hard at all.

Yes, I saw that, but I didn't have an Arduino then. And when I got one, it had disappeared off the site

An "Arduino" is really just a uC with a bootloader. There are many Arduino boards out there, and the "extra" HW doesn't really matter. An AtMega 328 (with optiboot and 16MHz resonator) should work fine, and isn't any different from an Uno (from the programming side).

And yes, I am also very anxiously awaiting it's arrival!

The reason I didn't sign up for the Alpha testing, is that I didn't have Arduinos at the time (or even ROBOTC).

Yeah, I know that it's just a bootloader. I just didn't know if the hardware mattered. Thanks Matt!

Well, the hardware does kind of matter because the sensor and motor setup assumes you have an Arduino board, so all the pins are labelled appropriately in the drop down boxes. Arduinos are super cheap and well worth getting for tinkering. The cool thing about the Arduino ROBOTC variant is that it also supports a couple of shields out of the box, so you basically just configure the shield and that makes a couple of things in your Motor and Sensor UI different (blocking pins that are used by that shields, etc)

Very cool stuff.

- Xander

They may be "super cheap" compared to other boards, but compared to a bare uC with a couple extra components, that's even cheaper. $30 to what, $5, $7?

Fortunately, the good people at Pololu put out a guide to using a 3Pi as a Arduino. If it works with the standard enviroment, I don't see why it wouldn't work with RobotC.

BTW, I already have conversion tables for the pins

Personally, I love the Picaxe microccontrollers. They're really cheap ($5 - 10), and full of features. The 20 X2 for example, gives you 18 IO pins, 11 ADC pins, Serial IO, Infrared IO, I2C, and speaker output. It can run at 64 MHz, and is programmable with a free BASIC style language. You just need a serial port (or a USB to serial cable), and the download circuit takes less than 5 minutes to set up. I use it for all my small hobby projects, as it's (relatively) tiny, and doesn't consume much power.

We're compatible with the Arduino Bootloaders - so as long as you have an Arduino Bootloader and are compatible with the Arduino Wiring Open Source language, we will work with it (As far as we know).

The confirmed boards we're working are:

Diecimila w/328 (FTDI)
Duemilanove w/328 (FTDI)
Uno w/328 (ATMega8) - R2
Uno w/328 (ATMega16) -R3
Uno w/328 (AtMega8) - SMD R2
MEGA w/1280 (FTDI) - R1
MEGA 2560 (ATMega8) - R2
MEGA 2560 (ATMega16) - R3
MEGA ADK 2560 (ATMega16) - R3

The MEGA 2560's are a little bit of a sad story because the Arduino folks have a bug in their bootloader firmware that do not allow "Incremental Downloads" - We have a slightly modified bootloader that you can use to replace your MEGA 2560 bootloader (using an AVR ISP) that will make it compatible with ROBOTC and the Open Source Language at the same time. Details will be available once we release - We're hoping to use our new wiki (http://www.robotc.net/wiki) to host the Arduino documentation during the public BETA.

[rant]AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't take the suspense!!!!!!! PLEASE SOMEBODY, KNOCK ME OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I don't know how much longer I can last without R0|>0C 4 @|~[)!/|/0. Oh, no. I'm slipping into 7331 mode! If I don't get help soon, I may turn completely DOS! RobotCCCCCCCCC!! Save me!!!!![/rant]

But, seriously, I absolutely cannot wait. I will be thanking you a thousand times once it comes out. I will. You'll see.

P.S. Thanks for the info, T.

Just to tide you over... only a few more days left!

Screenshot of GUI: http://i.imgur.com/shQ3x.png
Motors and Sensor Setup: http://i.imgur.com/FYafg.png (So many ports!)

In terms of debugging, we do have all of the normal ROBOTC features: Stepping, Breakpoints, Multi-Tasking, Debugger Windows, etc.

The last few bugs were working on are related to PWM generation with H-Bridges and Analog Output (PWM Analog Write). If all is well, then expect tomorrow EOD, otherwise Friday should be the day!