SXC Testing
Jared Woolston
Posts: 36
I just opened up my test version of the SXC compiler and installed it. At first glance it looks beautiful and easy to use. Looks like some Vista graphics ideas were used. Im working on a test program right now but as of yet Im just trying to get a feel for the program. The expandable sections are a really nice touch which should make long files and commenting much less of a pain to deal with. There are a lot of excellent features but some of them make me wonder if the program is intended for use on other target MCU's. I'll keep at it and let you know what I find out.
-Jared
-Jared
Comments
I am also a SX/C tester and will hopefully be joining the fun soon. My plan is to start porting code for the various hardware Parallax sells (Sensiron Temp/Humidity sensor, PING Ultrasonic Detector, HM55B Compass, HB-25 Motor Drivers, etc) once my compiler arrrives. All source code, glitches, or any tips I find will be posted to the SX forum.
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
What exactly did you get in your package? As for the compiler, in the original·post it mentioned something about an upgrade, does the compiler have a drop-dead date, or does it have somekind of limitations. I am waiting for my package also, but since I live in MI I probably will not get mine until next week.
Ray
By the way, I played around with the collapsible code sections....it would be really nice if they stayed closed after closing the program....i.e., you are writing code and collapse a section, then save and close. When you reopen, they should be closed still.
-Jared
What I would like to do is keep a running list of issues and or glitches that we encounter within all realms of the SX/C compiler. Basically, this would be things such as (as you mentioned in the post above mine) the collapsible code sections that do not stay closed after you reopen a file or other documentation/example errors. I was thinking that I could attach the list to my initial post and, eventually, I would like to create a Wiki with user created documentation.
Rsadeika,
You may want to email Lauren regarding if the software has a time limit. I don't think it does, but I may email Lauren myself just to make sure.
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
I think keeping a running list is a great idea. Let me know how you would like to do that for sure and I'll start typing
By the way, so you are less jealous everyone, I live 15 minutes from the Parallax building so it was a pretty quick mail process.
- Jared
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
Post Edited (alinious) : 7/19/2007 8:29:19 AM GMT
On that note:
If compilers and 'images' of other processors can be added into the device selector for a final release, someone will have a very powerful piece of software to take to market, especially if the C compiler is efficient which I have yet to get a chance to test.
-Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
I enjoy and feel that the all the Parallax forums are a great place to receive help and build knowledge but sometimes it is difficult to track down a program or project another user has created. My feeling is that by centralizing the information in a wiki and then posting descriptions to the forum will help to increase communication among all users along with manageability of source code/documentation.
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
The code for my RFID reader is finished using conventional SXKey....I plan to start the C code tonight
- Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
and a link to the syntax: Dokuwiki Syntax
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
HELP !!!
So I received one of the copies from Parallax, and installed it on my laptop.
Anxious to give something a try, I loaded one of the example programs.... SX_Led
And that seems to compile OK. Then try to debug it, and a message pops up stating that something is required in my (their) code. A "YES" option button said it will recompile to take care of whatever that was. So push it, and it recompiles, and another window opens stating that the selected device (SX is the only option) has no IDE debug facility.
And there I am staring at a very pretty but very useless screen.
What am I doing wrong please..... or what do I not understand, or is this just more of the same CCS quality that they have been pushing into SX market for years?
I will readly admit I'm a total newbie when it comes to "C", and have a ton to learn..... that was the very reason for trying C on such a small micro to begin with. But surely, things should not be this hard??
VERY VERY frustrating.
Try the HELP section ?....... WHAT help?.... Mostly just a rewording of the function description.
Try other example programs..... the same thing.
Compile some of the other example programs (not DEBUG), and you are staring pages of PIC mnemonics in the face! How ya gonna deal with that with the SX key.
Please help someone....... I'm sinking fast!
Cheers (sorta)
Peter (pjv)
Post Edited (pjv
I will try and replicate the problem right now and see what I can come up with, let me get back to you.
Jared
OK Peter,
I think im gonna need more info....what button specifically did you press? Debug or Debug File? Also, read the help file section I noted an error in the post below this one and make sure things are set up that way. No quotations on the path names, and dont forget them on the switches.
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
Post Edited (Jared Woolston) : 7/22/2007 7:20:29 AM GMT
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
Thanks for your interest. In the private SXC-Beta testers forum I received a response from Peter Verkaik, and he pointed me at something that helped. It caused me to discover that I could indeed invoke the SX debugger under the TOOLS button, the SX-Key symbol on the right hand side. It appears that it will download and debug from that location. I have been unable to get any other DEBUG buttons/windows to work. Peter had suggested the link to my SX-Key was not properly directed, but I can not see a difference. Will do some more testing.
Sorry for all the venting; I was very frustrated. If all this ends up working nicely, I'll surely grow out of it
Cheers,
Peter (pjv)
Good to here you got some feed back. no worries about the venting, i dont mind. As i said above, just try and make sure that they links are flawless. Im playing with the debugger and will let you know what I come up with. Keep me posted.
Another Bug Report:
I dont know if this is windows, SX Key or SXC but each time i hit program it opens a new instance of SXC....would be nice if it just used the existing open one.
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
Havn't head from you in the last day or two, hows the wiki? I know you were planning on writing a bunch of code for the parallax modules but would you mind if I took a couple from you? Or perhaps write two and compare. I dont have very many of their modules so specifically I was looking at the RFID, dual axis accelerometer and the temp/humidity modules.
-Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
Number 1: The tool tip for the create new project button states that an existing source file may be specified, or a new one may be created, however, near as I can tell it wont let you create a new source file, only open an existing one.
Number 2: When using the SX Wizard feature, switching from the "Drivers" tab to the "IO Pins" tab gives a notice error that can not be resolved. It reads, "List index out of bounds (0)". If you hit ok, another one comes up until you use task manager to kill the program. This is a repeated error for me, every time I try and use this feature.
Number 3: Under the RS232 Help topic, the command FLOAT_HIGH is listed twice
-Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
Post Edited (Jared Woolston) : 7/22/2007 5:27:34 PM GMT
The reason for the delay is that we are waiting on my domain name to propagate the free DNS servers (Zoneedit.com) I am using. Surprisingly, this takes approximately three days for the initial setup of the domain name I created through Godaddy.com. Effectively, I have a dedicated web-server that is shared with two other friends, but I was not actively using it. When the SX/C compiler came along, I felt this would be a great use and a good time to start an Open Documentation project that will benefit the eventual users of SX/C. Also, once things start taking effect with the SX/C wiki, I would like to create one for SX/B users but that is a whole other topic.
Jared:
Of course! Go ahead and start writing code for whatever hardware modules you would like, but just have some fun when you do it!
I am sorry that I can not assist with some of the questions I read earlier in the thread because I have not received my SX/C compiler yet.
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
Sounds good. Let me know when youre up and running with sxc...im finding bugs left and right and have only been successful in blinking some leds.
jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
Will do. Also, all of the various errors that have been reported in earlier posts have been copied to the wiki.
-Alan
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"I learn when I succeed, but I learn more when I fail."
- Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
just wanted to let you know that I have received my Beta copy some days ago. After having installed the package, I came across some oddities: I tried "Open Project", and found one in the "Projects" folder (SX_EXPIO.pjt). After opening it, I noticed that there were no files associated to this project at all. So I tried to close it again which resulted in an error "Project must be compiled first". Hey - how can I compile an empty project. I tried it anyway selecting "Compile - Compile" which ended up in an error "File cannot be opened" as expected. So, the only chance to terminate this was clicking the top right close box in the IDE window. Later I noticed that the missing files were located in the "Examples" folder, including another copy of the project file. After I opening the project there, I could successfully build the project.
I only received one warning: "Function not void and does not return a value MAIN". From my work with other C/C++ compilers, I'm used not to accept compiles with warnings, as you never know that defaults a specific compiler assumes. This warning can be easily fixed by replacing the declaration of "main()" in line 69 of SX_EXPIO.C by "void main()".
As I'm pretty busy with another Parallax-related project right now, I'll be able to focus on SXC in more detail in about a week, and let you know my results then.
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Greetings from Germany,
G
-Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
I did the first example SX_LED.C, and as I said that it would probably work, yes, it worked. Now what did I get out of the experience, absolutely nothing. But I think that is the response that they are hoping for, otherwise we would have gotten a fully functional copy.
At this moment I am not very impressed with the product, and would I pay money for a real copy, probably not. This is my first impression.
Hopefully, within the next week or so, when more people start to play with this, some of the secrets will be revealed. Maybe somebody will crack the code, and we will be able to use it.
Ray
I think that if you explored the program some you would see that it has a great deal of potential. also, how much do you know about c because the beauty of this software is the ability to use some of thigher level abilities of C. Also, SXC lets you perform floating point calculations without needing to keep track of remainders and modulus and so forth. That said, i think that while the program is by no means complete, it certainly isnt crippled.
-Jared
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A wise man who is not known for sure to have existed once said, "Never test a river with both feet." I feel this is especially true in engineering...throughout history everytime something new was tried with little research or planning, the odds were stacked in favor of failure, and everyone knows the house always wins in the long run....
I assume you've got the same version of the SXC software as all the other beta testers did. Although there are still bugs in the software (this is why we beta-test it), I'm pretty sure they did not build in such bugs by intention, just to make it crippleware.
Compiling the sample programs and getting them up an running can only be the first step in testing, just to warm up, and for getting used to the GUI and the specific "dialect" of the C language used here. The next step would be writing your own test programs, or to port some of your applications done in ASM before to C. This - of course - requires some knowledge of the C language. I don't think that the main purpose of SXC is to teach users how to program the SXes in C language. Let me compare this with SX/B: People who have been using Basic Stamps before love SX/B because they have already gathered experience programming in Stamp BASIC, so the migration to SX/B is pretty easy even without an SX/B language tutorial. Other people, like me, who are not that experienced with Basic Stamps don't use SX/B, and prefer programming in Assembly. As I did with other processors/controllers before, the step to a next higher level programming language following Assembly is almostg naturally C or C++.
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Greetings from Germany,
G