Thanks a bunch to all who replied.
I've been thinking about programming my TI83+, but right now my main issue is that I have no idea what I'd write for it. If I ever think of anything, I'll definitely give it a whirl.
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Originally Posted by Kingofl337
If your looking to learn more about programming Micro controllers here is a really good product from Atmel. The book is very good as well.
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Yeah, I've heard of the Butterfly and it looks very cool. I'll probably go with an Arduino as a development platform instead, however, because while similar (it's also AVR-based), its open source nature is more in line with my choice of operating system (Linux) and associated software (I'm no zealot, but I prefer to go open when it's a viable option).
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Originally Posted by stj_1533
My programming philosophy is that the program is the algorithm needed to do the job, not the syntax that a particular language requires to satisfy its compiler. You don't need to know the intricacies of C to get the 'bot to do the cool things you want - the basics of the language will get you there. You do need to know the math behind the robot behavior, though, and the subtleties of the control system. I'd steer you towards more math/physics stuff.
My main advice is to try to get access to robots (either by building them or finding them) with different drive trains and manipulators and see what you can to trying to program them. One huge advantage you have is that there are at least half a dozen other teams within about an arm's length of your home. I'd imagine you could get together with their programmers to get access to some old machines and see what you can learn.
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Hey, I remember seeing you guys at Peachtree!
That all sounds spot on to me, thanks. I'm thinking that a good course of action might be to begin perusing whatever useful math resources I can find (
MIT OCW seems especially nice, particularly its free calculus textbook; if there are any resources you or anyone else can suggest that'd be fantastic), and then build a small robot of my own I can program in my free time (I'm leaning towards a Tamiya
treaded chassis + a
gear box set + an Arduino + some cheapish sensors, a servo, etc).
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Originally Posted by stj_1533
One huge advantage you have is that there are at least half a dozen other teams within about an arm's length of your home.
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You're right on the mark with that, too.
It's also very nice to go to school literally minutes away from the regional.
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Originally Posted by starsROBOTICS
i am a beginner at programing too! i found that easyc is very useful but one thing that i don't understand is variables, macros, constants and arrays. What are they used for? And what kind of functions do they perform?
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As someone who had some programming experience but not nearly enough, I found "Essential C" (a free PDF document) from Stanford's CS dept. to be particularly useful; you might want to take a gander at that.
Quick, generalized rundown:
Variables are quite a bit like "x", "y", etc in Algebra; they are little chunks of data read and manipulated in a program.
The easiest way (for me) to think of macros is as "find and replace" commands run at compile time by the compiler's preprocessor. They're used in various ways to make code cleaner and more organized (and programmers more sane [or less insane?
]).
Constants are variables stored in memory and read by the program just like any others, except that the programmer specifies them as unchangeable (thus constant), and the compiler will spit out an error if it finds code that tries to modify them.
Arrays are groupings of like variables (e.g. "unsigned int exampleArray[50];" declares a set of 50 unsigned integers, referred in the program as "exampleArray[0]", "exampleArray[1]", "exampleArray[2]" ... "exampleArray[49]" -- the counting goes 0-49 rather than 1-50).