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Unread 10-04-2006, 17:45
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GlennGraham GlennGraham is offline
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AKA: Glenn Graham
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Join Date: Jan 2006
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Re: Programming Vex w/ MPLab

First, a big THANKS for this thread. I was able to set up the MPLAB IDE and start programming without too much effort. Well done!

At first, without knowing anything else about the VEX uController I used the displayed C code from a simple EasyC program as a model and wrote my own main() routine in MPLAB, compiled, linked, (using the supplied user_routines.o and user_routines_fast.o) and downloaded it to the robot. It ran as expected. After that, I continued exploring the message threads and found that another approach is to not use your own main() but instead use a pre-coded main() and re-implement User_Initialization(), Process_Data_From_Master_uP(), User_Autonomous_Code(), and Process_Data_From_Local_IO(). Could someone please compare and contrast these two approaches? From what I have read, using the later approach you can have code that is limited in how often it is executed by the Master uP data transfer verses code that isn't. What does that mean when I use the former approach and place all of my code inside my own main() routine? Is there a lot of overhead making multiple GetRxInput() and SetPWM() calls from my main()?

Thanks!
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