Moving to Activity Bot from BoeBot

tfiegenb

With the BoeBot when I ran a program, it was stored in flash and if I turned off the board and disconnected the cable it was still there. When turned on again I could push the RS button and continue to run the stored code. With the Activity Bot when I turn off the device, the code must be rewritten. What do I need to do in Simple IDE to tell it to store the code?

Duane Degn

Right next to the "Run Project" icon (an arrow pointing right) is the "Burn Project to EEPROM" icon (an arrow pointing down). This "Burn Project to EEPROM" will store the program to EEPROM so it will be available when the Propeller is restarted.

The shortcut to burning the program to EEPROM is the function key F11.

The EEPROM is good for a million writes so you shouldn't need to worry about wearing it out from saving programs to it.

The main advantage to saving a program to RAM rather than EEPROM is it's faster to save it to RAM by a few seconds.

tfiegenb

Many Thanks Duane

John Kauffman

tf:

One trap to watch. If you load a program in EEPROM it will behave just like Duane said - that is the solution to your question.

BUT: Sometimes my students load to EEPROM then come back to SIDE and continue working on their program and make a change. Then they run from RAM (F8 or F10). That runs fine as well. But if they then hit the reset - the program in EEPROM is run (NOT the last one that they loaded into RAM). Since that is usually the version of a couple of edits ago it looks like the code revisions were wrong and it is tricky to figure out the problem. This is especially true if they are sending info to the terminal because F8 is RAM & Terminal.

Remember: if you are going to be using the reset button or power on/off it is worth the time to always run by F11 to EEPROM.

- John