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Bots /The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 8

Chapter 8 Taking Control of the BrainStem Robot 215

To disable the auto-launch, you simply need to pass an invalid slot ID for
the final parameter:

2 18 15 255
2 19
One final note: when you create programs that you plan to auto-launch, the
first thing the program should do is go to sleep for a few seconds. This allows the
BrainStem to complete its bootup and initialization before the auto-launched
programcontinuesexecuting.Recallfromthechase.teaandsimple.teaprograms
that we’ve looked at that Acroname uses a five-second delay.

Writing Your Own TEA Programs

At this point, you should be ready to begin writing and executing your own
TEA programs on the BrainStem. There are many useful functions contained
in the library files in the aSystem directory. But for the most part, you only
need a few things to get started with TEA:
❏ The TEA file that is the starting point for your program must
have a main( ) function.
❏ You can read sensors with the aA2D_ReadInt(char) function.
Use one of the predefined constants APPRK_IR1, APPRK_IR2,
or APPRK_IR3 as arguments to this function.
❏ You can command the servos with the aPPRK_Go(char,char,char,char)
function. Note that the arguments are defined as chars to force
you to pass arguments in the range 0 to 255.
❏ You can pause the program with the aCore_Sleep(int) method.

Program the BrainStem Using Reflexes

Our whole point in writing this chapter has been to show you how to use what
you already know to program your robot. This section is going to violate that
purpose.Whileusingreflexesisn’tthatdifficult,itisnotsomethingyouprobably
already know how to do. It consists of new concepts and a new programming
language that you would need to learn. For those reasons, we will not spend a
great deal of time on reflexes. If, after reading this section, you want to pursue
reflexes in more detail, you should consult the reference manual provided
with the Acroname software.

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Monday, May 12, 2003 1:16:46 PM