Page 154 - The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms Robots
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calibrate
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B y now, you are probably getting a feel for this software. The main thing to keep in mind is to break your programs into small
pieces that can be easily tested and debugged. Interestingly, you can't retrieve a word definition from pbFORTH. The best way
to program with pbFORTH is to put your program in a text file on your PC. When you're ready to give it a try, download the
file to pbFORTH and test it ou t. You can modify the text source file to make changes or fix bugs and redownload the new
word definitions each time you want to test the program.
O nline Resources
F orth for Mindstorms
h ttp://www.hempeldesigng roup.com/lego/pbFORTH/
This is the center of the pbFORTH universe. Ralph Hempel, creator of pbFORTH, offers the current version of pbFORTH
here. You can also get the source code, sample Forth programs (including tortask.txt), and helpful advice and pointers.
p bFORTH rcxTk GUI
h ttp://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbFORTH/rcxTkGUI.html
This page describes some tools created by Ralph Hempel to make it easier to work with pbFORTH. The tools are based on
T cl/Tk.
Forth Interest Group Home Page
http://www.forth.org/
This site is a good jumping-off point for all sorts of interesting information about the Forth language. If you want to learn more
about Forth, this is a great place to start.
Tim Hendtlass's Real Time Forth Book
ftp://ftp.taygeta.com/pub/Forth/Liter ature/rtfv5.pdf
This is one of the resources available from the Forth Interest Group Home Page (see the previous entry). It is a tutorial
introduction to Forth. Although it describes a specific version in some detail, it's a good general introduction to the language
itself (see its chapters 1 through 5).
NQC—Not Quite C
http://www.enteract.com/~dbaum/lego/nqc/index.html
This is the home page for NQC. It's listed here because nqc can be used to download the pbFORTH firmware to the RCX.