GIRC (Graphical Interface for Robotic Control) is a program (aka sketch) that is written in Processing and enables the user to graphically program my robot to follow a course. The poor little microcontroller doesn’t understand computer graphics, so I have to translate the graphical information into numbers for each path segment: length of the segment, turn in degrees from the previous segment, and the heading (arbitrarily defined as the screen’s ‘up’).

These graphics-to-numbers conversion calculations will be accomplished in the seg_calc() function, which I’m working on now. At this point, however, I’m just trying to get the function to display information on the screen, as shown above. Once I finish that, I will be able to display calculation results onscreen and verify that they agree with the graphics, and so I can go on to write/test the calculations portion of the function.

(NOTE: if you click on the picture, it will magnify. And BTW, next time I’ll probably change LENG to DIST as it seems a more logical nomenclature.)