Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!know!sdd.hp.com!usc!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!rpi!uwm.edu!bionet!agate!sunspot.berkeley.edu!ericco From: ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu (Eric C. Olson) Newsgroups: comp.robotics Subject: Re: robot control software Message-ID: Date: 18 Oct 90 16:49:03 GMT References: <65275@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator) Organization: CEA @ UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA. Lines: 20 In-Reply-To: kube@cs.UAlberta.CA's message of 18 Oct 90 15:11:02 GMT I wrote some code for a gantry arm robot that now lives in LA. This is one of those "back in the old days" stories. The arm had 4DOF and a grip on the hand. The control language was BASIC! on an 8088 board. The language had a few extention words to do i/o to the controler. The machine had a whopping *64K* of memory, 32K of which was used by the *interpreter*. I did get it to work, but the interpreter was too slow. I had a hell of a time convincing the operators that they should buy the compiler. When they did buy it (several weeks *after* the installation) they were amazed that it was so much faster and that the timing in the code had to be re-written. BASIC was not good at all for robot control software. Too slow, too primitive. The only good idea was imbedding the controler commands directly into the language. Eric -- Eric ericco@ssl.berkeley.edu