EasyC Wish List

[BradAMiller]

Originally Posted by Gdeaver

My biggest wish for Easy-C has nothing to do with the IDE. It's the painfully slow down load that irritated us last Thurs. and Fri. while we working on the ball feeder code. I thought it might be the serial-USB driver but its the same with different chip and drivers. It took a matter of seconds to change the parameters, add a block and move stuff around. It really proved the advantage of a graphic IDE. We could have gotten things debugged much sooner if it wasn't so slow on the down load. Over all I say that Easy-C really did make the programming part of the season easy. Much better than watching the students battle MPLAB all season last year. Thanks intelliteck and First for putting A visual IDE in the kit this year.

If you have a laptop with a serial port on it, the downloads go about 3X faster than through the USB adapter. I have an older laptop that I'm keeping around for exactly that reason.

[P1h3r1e3d13]

Originally Posted by gt6872c

Is it possible to write to any of the other User Bytes [besides User_Byte1 using the SetUserDisplay() function] that are sent back to the OI from the RC using EasyC? Thanks in advance.

It took me a while to get the following figured out, so here's what (I think) I know about your question:

I do not think there is anything called User_Byte1 that exists by default in EasyC.
Nor am I aware of any User Bytes other than the one that shows up as uXXX on the OI.

The "hard" C default code includes code that controls the OI LEDs based on joystick and button inputs (and maybe it controls the User Byte - I don't remember). An EasyC project, by default, does not send anything to the UB or the OI LEDs. All you can do is essentially the same as you can do in "hard" C: add OILED() and SetUserByte() commands. You can, of course, set them to variables.

If this doesn't address your question, perhaps a little more detail on what you are trying to do might help me/us.

[BradAMiller]

Originally Posted by gt6872c

Is it possible to write to any of the other User Bytes [besides User_Byte1 using the SetUserDisplay() function] that are sent back to the OI from the RC using EasyC? Thanks in advance.

As delivered you can write write values to the LEDs or the numeric display. EasyC looks at the setting of the display mode switch on the OI and either sends whatever you set for the single bit (LEDs) display or it sends the value you set for the numeric user display. So if you press the display select button on the OI and cycle to the U - user display setting, you'll see the number that you put in the SetUserDisplay function. If you set it to anything else, you'll see the LEDs have the values set with the SETOILED function.

Now, if you want to get more data back to the OI, you can connect a laptop to the dashboard port, then you can send lots of data back. We built a display with an image of a car dashboard and rendered dials for the tach and speedometer. The dials indicated the robot speed and ball pitcher speed. And there were a bunch of other indicators for low battery, etc.

[gabrielse]

I wish the next version of EasyC has a built in implementation of a switch statement.

Our student programmer this year had a hard time following a mess of nested if statements.

She learned how to make state diagrams and to implement them using switch statements. She had a much easier time debugging and writing code with switch statements.

We are training new programmers with EasyC. A "non-user code" switch statement would really help. Thanks.

[Kingofl337]

Good call on switch. Would have been helpful for our team as well.

[P1h3r1e3d13]

How about more help on the use of libraries? I never did figure out how to use "math."

[Chris_Elston]

I wish in the next version we could "record" all the varibles in our program for some many CPU loops. Like define 100 loops. Then hit record.....

Let the CPU loop 100 times, and store all the varibles in our project into a database. Then for DEBUG MODE, we can hit "play" and step though each CPU loop, pausing and stepping through our code like a cpu pointer, only when we hover over the varible, it will display the value of that varible, and type of varible during play back mode.....

In other words, I know we probablly can't have online debugging, pausing, stepping, but the ability to record so many CPU cycles, then play back would be really SWEET....of course, any If statements would excute correctly based on the value of that varible pulled from the recorded session.


and please do fix the project printing....It would be nice to print out ALL the functions like in a project print, instead of each one....



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[P1h3r1e3d13]

That would be really, really cool.
As a (poor) substitute (and you probably already figured as much anyway), I did something like that by putting a PrintScreen for each variable (or a printf for several) at the end of the loop (or after each time you change the variable), and incrementing a counter variable each loop. Then change your main While(1) loop to While(counter <=100) (or just make it a For() loop).

[epl692]

a random number function, i have found that i almost needed one.... (i was making some new search code for the camara... then i found out that the tracking will auto search....) or a visual reprersentation of the first OI (where you can see a labeled diagram of what comes out where.... cheak your code to your robot, even if its not labeled well...(like the manuel control they have now but more visual to a point) but then who dosent have a perfectly labeled and easy to understand robot.... )

[Kingofl337]

Originally Posted by epl692

a random number function, i have found that i almost needed one.... (i was making some new search code for the camara... then i found out that the tracking will auto search....) or a visual reprersentation of the first OI (where you can see a labeled diagram of what comes out where.... cheak your code to your robot, even if its not labeled well...(like the manuel control they have now but more visual to a point) but then who dosent have a perfectly labeled and easy to understand robot.... )

Thank You for your ideas. We are always looking to improve easyC to make it the best it can be.