Thread created automatically to discuss a document in the White Papers.
An Introduction to C Programming for First Robotics Applications by eugenebrooks
I have posted a rather long “white paper” with the title listed above with the goal of giving students, and possibly teacher/mentors, a good start with C programming for the robot. This document is not a substitute for the variety of currently available materials devoted to robot programming. Rather, it is designed to compliment them. It describes those portions of the C programming language that you are likely to use in the robot program and how they are used to achieve your goals in code for the control system. It has both tutorial and more sophisticated content.
The tutorial content uses the freely available Extensible Interactive C interpreter, written by Ed Breen, as a vehicle to explore the properties of simple C statements, variable definitions and functions.
The “not-so-tutorial” portion of the content explores binary arithmetic, the relationship between shifts and multiplies, and takes things as far as how to implement fixed-point arithmetic. A library routine (missing from the IFI default code) to print long integers and long integers representing fixed-point is described and is included as source code in the companion EiC distribution.
Any discussion, corrections and suggestions for improvements for the document would be happily received in this thread. As noted, the document is a work in progress and will likely see further improvement before the kickoff in response to any suggestions.
Eugene Brooks
Eugene,
I tried to open the paper but received an error message “File not found”.
Eugene,
It looks great! It will take me some time to read all 36 pages.
I’m going to add this document to the resource page of NYC teams.
Thank You! 
What application can I use to open this paper. Nothing on my computer will open it.
Right click and choose save as at the white papers page, there is some kind of glitch that wont let you directly open the file.
It looks like it is a .pdf file
I have read the entire paper and think you did a wonderful job. The only problems I could spot were a couple mis-spelled words. Very nice job. I’ll be handing this paper out to my programmers.
Save the file locally (what DJ said) and open with Acrobat Reader.
I get a copy when I download it from ChiefDelphi, but the file name
is prepended with a large number that makes it very long, and PCs
might not like that. Try the technical page from www.srvhsrobotics.org,
this also being the place where updated copies of the paper will be found
roughly weekly, and the EiC distribution supporting it can also be found.
Hi Eugene! This looks great, I’ll show it to my team.
An updated version of the white paper, now 66 pages, is available at the www.srvhsrobotics.org web site in the Technical page. The new version is dated Nov 26, 2004.
In addition to revisions throughout, more material covering interrupts and state machines has been added. Of particular note is a demonstration of the hazards associated with access to variables updated by interrupt handlers. This is something that must be carefully attended to if your program employing interrupts is to be kept robust.