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Originally Posted by Qbranch
Easy C is very limited... i'd suggest making the jump to light speed... eh ... i mean Microchip C...
If you need any help just hit me up.
-Q
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First let me state that I use MPLAB and/or Eclipse for all of my robot programming. However I also must state that you are quite wrong. I believed the same thing for quite a while until we played against team 40 and until I talked to them. I would have to guess that there were very few robots that were more complex programming wise than team 40's I am sure there were some but between Mecanum drive and shooting in auto the code for that bot was far from simple. For any one who didn't see them compete in the majority of there matches no matter what problems the had, the always functioned extremely well in autonomous.
I have since last season had some time to play with easy-c and went to the programming workshop that team 40 held. I must say I was surprised at how quickly people picked up easy c. By the end of an 8 or so hour day all the teams had recreated their user code and were working on camera code, something that many of them managed to make work. Some things are inconvenient to do in easy-c (like declaring variables) but nothing is more difficult in easy c. Once you have your basic stuff together, like variables declared it is incredibly easy to get every thing else working. As a bonus there are rumors that easy c may see some improvements this year possibly leading to being able to edit code created in easy c(again just rumors but don't be surprised).
OK I will admit that while I am incredibly impressed by easy c I will not be using it next season (unless some big changes happen like being able to edit the .c and .h files using real code rather than the programs). This however is only because I am a little bit stubborn and because I can write my own code in c with out a problem, I have been doing it for a couple of years and am quite satisfied with my abilities. However there is absolutely no reason not to learn to use easy c especially if you are not already pretty good at programming in c. Easy c is not a limiting factor and should certainly not be looked at that way. I highly recommend easy c to any one new to programming regardless of what team you are on. Don't be surprised to see some of the more accomplished teams use easy c, among the teams at Team 40's work shop were 1276(2006 Manchester regional winners) 1100(they had a working turret, camera controlled this year) and a little team you might have heard of, 126(come on its Gael Force there has only been 1 year since '96 they didn't bring home awards).
Any way please don't say that easy c is limited, it isn't.
James