Page 25 - The Ultimate Palm Robot

Color profile: Generic CMYK printer profile
Composite Default screen
Bots / The Ultimate Palm Robot/ Mukhar & Johnson / 222880-6 / Chapter 1

8 The Ultimate Palm Robot

Timbot that we mentioned earlier in the chapter, you need to learn a new pro-
gramming language to be able to use the robot. If you’re not a programmer,
you need to learn how to program as well. We’re willing to bet that you are
more interested in building a robot that does interesting things, rather than
learning how to program.
But doesn’t the Palm need to be programmed?

Well, yes. But if you’re the hobbyist who wants to spend time building and
playing with the robot rather than learning how to program, this book will
come in handy. We’ll show you where to go on the web to get programs you
can use with your robot. We’ll also provide you with a simple application that
that you can use to create your own programs; it does most of the program-
ming work for you.
And if you want to do your own programming, you’ll get the chance to
sling code to your heart’s content. Programming for the Palm uses existing
languages like C or BASIC that many programmers already know. So if you
already know how to program in C, C++, BASIC, or Java, this book will get
you started.
Before we get to the robot itself, let’s take a quick look at the Palm PDA.

The Rise (but Not Fall) of the Palm Empire

The Palm was not the first PDA to hit the streets, but it certainly was the
first successful one. One of the first PDAs was the Apple Newton. Dave,
gadget freak that he is, owned a Newton. Okay, he owned several of them.
But we digress.
The Newton was an extremely capable device, but it had a few fatal flaws,
the most important of which was its size. Unlike today’s PDAs, you couldn’t
fit a Newton into your pocket. Well, not unless you had really big pockets.
And it was relatively heavy, so if you did put it into your pants pocket, your
pants would sag halfway down to your knees. And thus the Newton led to
that great fashion statement for young men of the nineties: droopy oversized
pants with big pockets.

The world of PDAs changed drastically in 1994, when Jeff Hawkins, a de-
veloper of software for the Newton and other fledgling handheld devices,
founded a company called Palm Computing and decided that he could make

P:\010Comp\Bots\880-6\ch01.vp
Monday, May 12, 2003 10:09:07 AM