VexCode IQ Compiling Error when Downloading to Brain

Frequently get the VexCode IQ Compiling Error - make not found or invalid. The only way to overcome is to close VexCode IQ, delete Program from Brain…restart VexCode IQ and then try again. Is there a better or faster way to resolve this ?

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We’ve seen this if a particularly overzealous AntiVirus software is preventing the “Make” process from running agains after it runs the first time. The fact that it works once and then doesn’t work afterwards seems that it’s either the above issue or some other security policy kicking in…

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Interesting…and then when the vexcode iq software is restarted…it over-rides the security policy ? Seems ambiguous …it seems it could throw a more specific error code…then simply a ‘make’ related issue. I don’t think a security policy should come in the way of the code compiling within the application. Anyway - I do appreciate your quick response, but this is an opportunity to improve the application.

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It may be a good idea to check ‘compilation’…and then have a separate button to download to brain. We are also getting a few ‘compiler process has timed out’ …why would that be ?

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All issues seem to point to the make.exe compiler being blocked or interrupted by an external application. There’s not much the VEXcode Blocks software can do if something else is preventing the C++ compiler from running behind the scenes. The issue you’re seeing in the details is the output from the command line trying to run the compiler.

Maybe @jpearman has some other ideas. We’ve only seen this reported 1-2 other times and both times it was an AntiVirus program flagging make.exe as an unsafe program.

The build (ie. compilation, linking etc.) process is external to the application. When a build is requested, the application starts a program called make.exe ( details here ) which coordinates the build process. When running under windows, make will create a batch file for some of the commands it needs to run, these include creating directories for the output of the build process, compiling the source code that has been generated from the blocks and then linking everything together into a file which can be downloaded to the IQ brain.

Aggressive anti-virus software could interfere with this process, one test would be to temporarily disable any anti-virus and see if that resolves the issue. A windows group policy that disables use of the command prompt will also stop the build process from running due to its use of .bat files, however, this would not even allow the first build to complete.

I’m not sure why you would need to delete the program from the IQ brain to allow this to work, that seems unrelated to the make issue, unless IQ blocks tries to download a non-existent program file or something like that due to build failure.

How often are you seeing the “make not found or invalid” error ?

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this is the message…we are averaging about 2 times in 2 hours of our session.

So when that error message is displayed, will subsequent download/builds work or do you have to relaunch the application first ?

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Ok, so I think I know what may be happening, I will talk to the blocks team tomorrow.

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Thank you…and yes have to relaunch the application :frowning: