Answered: MPLAB and VEXnet

VEX V5 Technical Support OFFICIAL Tech Support
1

At the recent World Championships, I was (by our team’s own fault) surprised to see that it was a VEXnet-only event, and our crystal sets were useless to us. We managed to get the upgrade kits and set them up. While the other 3 teams from our school were already driving around, I was still hacking to no avail to get my code to work, so finally I asked the Intelitek help guy (very nice guy, knows a lot), and he revealed that there isn’t a way to program for VEXnet through MPLAB so far. Fortunately, I had switched from the default code to WPILib before the Austin regional due to field control system incompatibilities, and it was fairly simple to move the project over to the EasyC Pro trial he gave me.

I am surprised and a little frustrated to see that there is no straight-C option for VEX anymore if you intend on using VEXnet. EasyC uses WPILib and the Microchip C18 compiler, so there should be no conflict in creating a patch for MPLAB, or even a middle-man program, which does the same thing.

My questions are:

  1. What changes were made to RobotC and EasyC to support the new VEXnet system?
  2. Are there any plans to port this solution to MPLAB (or of particular interest to me, the C18 compiler itself, as I use a Linux clone of MPLAB with C18 running on an emulator)?
  3. Is there anything I can do to configure MPLAB/C18 compiler to work with the new VEXnet system on my own?
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1) You will need to ask ROBOTC and easyC for these changes.
2) There are no plans to support MPLAB with the CORTEX Microcontroller. MPLAB still works with the PIC Microcontroller and the VEXnet Upgrade Modules.
3) The MPLAB product was designed for us by Microchip to use with their microprocessor we use inside the PIC Microcontroller. MPLAB is not compatible with the processor we use inside the CORTEX Microcontroller.