First experiments with the LEGO software

First experiments with the LEGO software

Developing the software for running the brick with EV3 is fairly easy. On a Windows 8 machine, I needed to install 2 things from the LEGO site. Both installed with no issue and no real difficulty. After having both of these installed I started the software and was presented with a wealth of tutorials and quick-start guides. After about 5 minutes of watching one of the relevant (for me - development) videos, I was ready to get started - or so I thought. First I had to update the Brick's firmware. This was easily accomplished in about a minute with no problems. Now I was good to go for my initial development.

Drag'n'Drop Programming. The above does nothing, but shows a few "building-blocks"

Quickly after creating a new project, I saw the above scary image: Drag'n'Drop programming. One of my dreaded enemies and a practice I loath. However, after trying it out I have to admit that LEGO actually have a pretty decent interface and that I could probably program any behavior I wanted for any given robot, with this approach. What's even more impressive, is that while the robot is hooked up to the pc, I can with the press of a key (or the big green arrow) execute the program on my brick. The uploading and execution of the program works smoothly and (for me, at least) very intuitively.
I made several small experiments involving making a wheel revolve 360 degrees, reading what the light-sensor recorded and stuff like that. Nothing worth posting, as it mostly involved connecting 2 programming components and pressing "Run".

All in all it was a much more pleasant experience then I expected upon seeing the programming interface.

Moving on from the software, I also built the robot detailed in the physical user-guide. The guide claims that you can build the robot in 45 minutes, but I guess I must either be a little slow, or it meant any given version of the robot. I spent about 1 hour to build the robot with all extensions applied to it, and only about 20 min to build the robot without any extensions. The 1 hour mark was without any of the suggested programming of the sensors/actuators applied in a given step!
Her is the finished beast:

Start robot, top (30cm ruler)

Start robot, angle

The brick comes pre-programmed with a small demo-program, which makes the robot drive, turn and drive again. While during this a pair of eyes with decreasing amount of wakefulness are displayed on the brick. This can be seen in the below video:

Now all the above is nice a well, but I feel that I should at least describe the one irritation I experienced duing the above tests: The brick is quite slow at starting up and even worse at shutting down (2 tests, both same duration):

Startup:     ~30 seconds

Shutdown: ~45 seconds

And this is with the latest firmware update! Compared to my laptop (running Ubuntu 13.04, old HardDisk):

Startup:     ~  45 seconds

Shutdown: ~    8 seconds

I do have hopes that this will change in the future, but seeing as the brick spends a huge amount of time on the shutdown procedure, I expect that something isn't quite right in that department.