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Greenfoot back
brian
brian wrote ...

2011/11/16

PicoBoard and Greenfoot

brian brian

2011/11/16

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I have recently got a PicoBoard for use with Scratch but was told that it would also work with Greenfoot. I have got the board working successfully with Scratch but when I try using it with Greenfoot the reading seem to jump around a lot and it even occassionaly says the button is being pressed when it definitely isn't! As it appears to work with scratch I don't think it is a faulty board. Has any one any experience of this? Brian.
mjrb4 mjrb4

2011/11/17

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Hi Brian, are you using the version of the libraries you can download at the moment? There were a few issues with the original one that went up there due to an apparent race hazard in the board itself, but the latest one that's been up there for some time works for me. I've just tried downloading and running it again and I'm on a different machine now than originally and it still works fine. What OS are you using? I don't suppose you have another board lying around you can try just in case? We have two boards here I've tried and both seem ok.
brian brian

2011/11/17

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Don't have another board currently although I hope that is going to change soon. The computer is running on Windows 7 and we only downloaded the template project yesterday so I presume it is the most up-to-date version unless I'm meant to be downloading the libraries seperately from somewhere else? As I said I don't think it is the board because I don't see any problems in scratch (I wrote a quick script that just displays all the sensor values and it works fine). Was the libraries written for a particular driver or should the standard one work? Brian.
mjrb4 mjrb4

2011/11/17

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It does seem odd - I'm also running Windows 7 and yes, the current template project has been up for months so it was only if you'd downloaded it ages ago! The driver shouldn't be the issue here, all the board does is spit out the current sensor values, encoded, over an emulated serial port. Greenfoot reads in the data, decodes it according to the spec and then provides the de-coded values over a friendly API. The only other thing I can really think of is that there's some corner cases in the encoding or error checking that I didn't deal with properly; I can't recall if this was the case but I didn't hugely look into it because it always worked ok for me. If you do get another board I'd be interested to hear if you see the same issues!
mjrb4 mjrb4

2011/11/17

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There's no error checking in the spec that I can see, so that rules that one out. At this stage unfortunately I'm really not sure, and we can't really fix the problem since we can't reproduce it. If you have any more information though feel free to pass it on.
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