what is a better progam easy c pro robotc or mp lab
**It comes down to a matter of complexity and user preference.
I am moving your thread to the unofficial answers section for community input.**
Look at the Wiki Pages describing each Programming Environment…
[LIST]
*]EasyC by intelitek
*]ROBOTC by the CMU Robotics Academy
*]MPLAB by MicroChip
*]SDCC and OpenVex Open Source Vex Programming
[/LIST]
EasyC is very Easy to use, ROBOTC gives you some Threading and a common development environment with the Lego ROBOTC, MPLAB and MCC18 gives you the Full Control of the PIC Processor and SDCC gives you the Option of Open Source.
If you are planning on doing any vex games I would use easyC only because there have been studies showing that the timing with robotC and some of the other programs are off when enabling. If you are not and just want to do fun stuff with vex I would use some other program (dragging and dropping gets really annoying).
I have a cabinet full of VEX (and FIRST FTC) trophies that show that you can program competition robots in RobotC. Just sayin…
Since ADVANCED programmers should be spending their time teaching noobs how to program, you might want to pick something that gives you BOTH options …
My 2cents …
OPININATED RESPONSE:
RobotC hands down, here’s why:
- Full text editor that provides realistic diagnostics
- Virtual threads via task expression
- Real-time debugger capable of showing actual diagnostic information (not just log based user print statements)
- GUI based robot configuration menu
- Many more smaller features…
/OPININATED RESPONSE
-Cody
<2cents>
For my money MpLAB all the way. It has the power and versatility of Robot C without doing any of the nasty stuff it does to compile it down to the chip. It will produce the same output code as EasyC (both use the C18 compiler) and is one helluva lot easier than drag and drop.
Having said that, I’m a little concerned about the use of MPLab given the move to the cortex. Hopefully some forms of high end compiler (ARM GCC anyone?) will be able to be used in order to give the high end users more to play with.
If you’re not used to hardware level programming, task scheduling and resource management, then I would probably look at RobotC.
</2cents>
I am curious, can you point us to documentation of these studies?
My team (#24) is similar to Rick’s- we have many trophies sitting on the shelf for Robots that use code written in Robot C. Don’t get me wrong, we ran for several years with Easy C, which is a good starting point. But there comes a point where the compexity of Robot C makes complex tasks easier to code.