Here’s the start of my first Vex bot. It is a modified squarebot design using some of the Vex mini metal I could find around the office. I got a handful of sensors and will be working on turning this guy into a little autonomous bot.
My first hurdle was finding a working PIC loader for Linux. Fortunately someone has written one that works well. You can find the source here: IFI Linux PICloader.
The next step is to find a way to compile the code in Linux. SDCC appears to be the only open source compiler that supports the Microchip PICs and it isn’t completely supported yet. Some people have reported luck getting code to run on Vex though so I’m going to give it a try next. Failing that I can use one of a couple compilers written for Windows under Wine, but I’d rather not.
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There is a programmer for PIC’s under Linux called Piklab, which is basically a KDE-based Linux clone of MPLab. It includes loaders, but I think MPLab does too, but everyone uses IFI Loader still, so I doubt they work for VEX. However, the Piklab environment is very friendly and very well laid out, an extremely easy transition from MPLab to Piklab. I highly recommend it. It already has very good support and is stable, and I’ve heard better news about it than SDCC. Piklab, just as MPLab, is capable of compiling default code as well as using libraries (I personally use WPILib). Hope this helps.
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