In the documentation for the TXT-C-Programming-Expert kit that fischertechnik put online 2 weeks ago, it is suggested that you can access the 'transfer area' information via a local TXT TCP socket, and that seems to work.
These steps are not completely trivial, so I hope ft comes up with something simpler soon, but I managed to do this without knowing anything about socket APIs on linux and ARM toolchains.
At a high level, I got the Eclipse C++ IDE on linux, and an Eclipse plugin that uses the toolchain that the buildroot/Linux sources uses. In that way you can build a TXT solution without having to configure a toolchain yourself. Then of course you need to make some changes to the 'common' C++ sources that ft provides, to deal with the sockets on linux rather than Windows.
Slightly more detailed steps:
- Running an ubuntu linux VM on a Mac
- Get the TXT Linux sources from the ft website.
- Configure buildroot to create an eclipse config file that will tell eclipse what toolchain to use for the TXT:
- Configure buildroot using the command '$make menuconfig' on the folder ft-TXT downloaded from the ft web site
Go to the toolchain menu
Select the option 'Register toolchain within Eclipse Buildroot plug-in
- Get eclipse. I used the lunar version.
- Get the eclipse buildroot plugin. This step and the above 3 steps are described here: https://github.com/mbats/eclipse-buildr ... plugin-%3F
- Start a new C++ project in eclipse. The Buildroot-ARM toolchain should show up as a Toolchain option. I started with the MotorOnOff example provided by ft. Copy the Main.ccp and the files in the Common directory to your project.
- Try to build and find everything you need to fix. Mostly related to sockets, although that was relatively easy with a bit of googling (error codes, closesocket, a few header files). Also need to the change the TXT IP address from 192.168.7.2 to localhost in Main.ccp. I can provide copies of the modified sources on request.
- Once the build is successful, copy the result to the TXT, folder ROBOProFIles, using scp.
- Now you can run it, either from the TXT screen or using ssh. In the latter case you can get console output.
Couple of notes:
- Haven't used the camera and the JpegDecode sources yet. They gave lots of build errors. Need to look into that.
- The TXT timers seem to be messed up. MotorOnOff uses the 10ms timer to run for 10s, but it seems to run ~10 times too fast.
Regards,
Willem Evert.