RCX

[Diroga]

i like perl that's all. i didnt know any one else here knew it.

[whitetiger0990]

i like perl that's all. i didnt know any one else here knew it.

this is a programming forum >_>

[Zap]

I know it's possible in VB, using spirit.ocx, but I guess you can do it if you tower has a paralel connection. If you don't have VB you can use VB for Applications, ei from Word.

The .ocx file is installed with the rest of the dev sys.

[RST]

I'm using a USB IR tower..... Does anyone have any libs that allow communication with the USB ports, even if they're not specifically for the RCX?

[adosorken]

I've done a bit of research in the field of DOS USB and have come up mostly empty-handed. It seems that there is little to no actual USB support in DOS. There are a couple of companies who make VERY EXPENSIVE USB drivers for DOS but generally focus on specific uses of the USB ports. In addition, its seems information on how USB works is hard to come by, since 99% of companies simply use Windows'own functions and they never even have to mess with USB because to their programs, it doesn't matter. Hardware abstraction makes their jobs easier. What you might want to consider doing is looking into how Linux does it...that might open a few doors.

[Plasma]

It's probably going to be easier to just buy the serial IR...

[Hexadecimal Disaster]

Yeah. To have money makes wonders.

[toonski84]

Proficient? maybe. Talented? Nah. Damn good looking? Hell, yeah.

[wizardlife]

Regarding the original question, which was how to program the RCX in QB: Don't bother. There are other languages out there that are more powerful and stable than anything you could do, and they're all based on C-syntax... which isn't really that hard.

The easiest is NQC, which runs on the standard firmware and is interpreted. It's good for rovers, claws, and anything else where you don't need arrays or recursion or even a proper stack.

The two that I looked into for my connect4-playing-bot. were both options that provided a new firmware with less babysitting and a lot more power.

The first was BrickOS, which uses the cross-compiler provided by Hitachi, who make the 16 MHz processor inside the RCX. It's developed on *nix platforms, so to run it on windows, you need the Cygwin emulator.

The second option is QuiteC. This was specifically intended for Windows platform, and is reported to be much easier to install. QuiteC differs significantly from BrickOS in that it compiles your progam as a firmware file and then downloads it, rather than downloading a kernel first and then the progam.

I ended up going with BrickOS, because I liked the cross-platforming. I wrote the entire logic in a header file plugged into a PC front-end and then it was completely portable to the brick controller progam... apart from the limitations in processor and memory.