Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien1247
Having to code the entire robot in assembly. That would scare me.  |
I am currently in college and I have to say that programming in assembly is far easier than it is in C or BASIC. Mostly because in assembly you write in small units and it is easier to test where something went wrong. Interrupts and other such things become much easier.
Last semester I worked on a robot that was able to navigate itself around obstacles and stay away from tables and other such items.
The entire thing was done in assembly, written on top of a Parallax SX chip. The only sensors were bumper sensors (simple whiskers) and infra-red. It took just about 160 lines of assembly to get it all working extremely well. When we (me and my team mate) re-wrote the code in SX/B (BASIC variant for the SX) it took us many more lines as we had to program around the flaws that existed in SX/B, and the fact that it would otherwise not be fast enough at the 1 Mhz the chip ran at.
As for more intensive robots would I chose assembly? Probably not, thinking back to my FIRST experience I would have certainly done more inline assembly for our robot only because it would have sped certain parts up which were really doing too much processing.
I used to hate assembly, until I started programming in assembly, and that is when I really started to love the fact that you have so much more control over the hardware, you can optimise so much more than any compiler could possibly ever do. Assembly also changes the way you approach a problem and the way you think.