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Good purchase
I think that the experiment boards that Parallax puts out are pretty worthwhile.
They have a lot of very good demos and examples that let you sort of get the Zen of Pbasic programming.
One thing to be careful about is that the vast majority of Pbasic instructions are of no use at all to you when it comes to FIRST.
The Innovation First hardware does not give you direct access to the input or output pins (with the exception of a few LEDs on the RC that you can flash directly if you want). All the other ins and outs go through the Master CPU. Further, the Master CPU works as a watchdog timer. If your Pbasic loop takes too long (basically you have 150 msec max), the Master CPU will assume you are hopely lost and will shut off your outputs. This is not a particular nice thing to have happen during a match, so I don't recommend it.
This system architecture makes most of the Pbasic functions useless (e.g. Pulsein, PWMout, Count, Tone, etc.).
I hope this helps.
Joe J.
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