Hi! Recently my robotics team has undergone a series of changes including advisor changes. Among all these changes, much of our equipment is being updated including the laptops we use to program our robots. The devices we ordered are in fact MacBooks–however, our school technician informed us Easy C wouldn’t work on our MacBooks. Is there any alternate to this or way we can use Easy C on our MacBooks.
I’m assuming you are asking about programming options for the Cortex, since you are using EasyC.
There are ways to run Windows on a Mac so you can continue to use EasyC, but the experience will not be ideal.
If you choose to go this route, Boot Camp will likely be the best option for the job. Note that you will need Windows 10 licenses for each computer (for personal machines, lots of people get away with unactivated copies of Windows 10, but you really shouldn’t do this with school computers)
To avoid Windows, you will need to program in PROS or one of the Robot Mesh Studio options.
Edit: You can also use MATLAB/Simulink
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Parallels is also a good solution. It costs some money but it is more seamless than Boot Camp and easier to set up for using Windows on a mac.
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When you move to V5, then there are plenty of options that will run on Macs. Vex Coding Studio, Robotmesh Studio, PROS and more. As for running Easy C, you will need to do one of the things mentioned above, go to a Virtual Machine like Parallels or dual boot using Boot Camp.
My team is also programming on a mac book i was wondering if there was a way to use the vex coding studio to program a cortex?
No. Vex Coding studio (and the universally superior VexCode) does not support programming the cortex. For that you’ll need to use another solution, such as RMS, RobotC, or PROS.
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Ok thank you alot appreciate the help!
If you just need a code editor with the robotC language on macOS. I think @jpearman made a plugin to Sublime Text which is a code editing software that would enable Sublime to recognise robotC. It does not compile or download to robots though. Just a way to save battery when coding robotC outside.
I strongly recommend that you try to find a solution other than EasyC.
Robot Mesh Studio is much more capable, and, more importantly, offers much more room for students to grow. It offers a graphical programming language as well as python for more advanced students (blockly actually generates python code so students can more easily transition. It also offers the “mimic” simulator which allows for simulation similar to RobotC’s RVW. Combine all that with full support for the V5 system (with even more languages such as C++ and JavaScript) and, in my opinion, RMS is currently the best solution for educational robotics programming. Personally, over the summer I taught a class of complete noobs to program the robot to make its way through a maze in a few hours start to finish.
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Thanks a lot this is going to help a bunch.