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Planning & The Transterpreter

Today, class did not proceed as planned from last class period. We had planned on working with the Arduinos, unfortunately, some guy name Matt Jadud locked the Arduinos in his office. Consequently, today consisted of redefining the direction we want this course to go in. We have have decided that we should:

• Have a simulation environment set up that can occam runtime. We figured this is essential to any future progress so we can test code rather than just throwing it on a plane and praying for the best.
• Once we get the simulation set up and working, we would like to have a plane to fly, even if it means using the kit so we can see some code in life rather than just a simulation.

The remaining time was spent reading about the background of the Tranterpreter and about its structure and performance. Of course, writing this blog post was also part of the class. :p

The Transterperter

From our understanding of the reading, we were able to see that the Transterpeter still has room for improvement in speeds, but it provides a substantial boost in speed (10%) when running PAR. Based on our understanding of what we will be using occam-pi and the Transterperter for, this is essential. Due to us being limited in our hardware, we need to be able to have programs that have small footprints, and yet can be run at high speeds in PAR.

Did You Know

Using Occam and the Transterpreter is an excellent choice for introductory robotics programming in LEGO MindStorms Kit because:

1. It is a better introduction to programming than Robolab
2. The syntax is easy to understand
3. It runs smoothly on the hardware