Wow, those are exciting prospects!

It might be better if I wait for the new version before purchasing the hardware? I hope that the previous project work is retained and there is upward compatibility.

I would probably stick with the Win version as I have been active within this OS for many years. When choosing a suitable robot IDE/SW, I initially chose between MyRobotLab, ROS or ARC. So far I think ARC has been a good choice.

Good to hear that ARC is being further developed. I'm really excited, March is almost here.

@DJ,

Quote:

" It's about ten times faster if the browser is on another computer."

Maybe I can figure out another way to pause my scripts instead of using Sleep() commands. I'm open to advice.

Don't get me wrong, I'm really looking forward to the new Arcx and all it has to offer. It'll be a whole new animal to tame.

My apologies to the OP for hijacking his thread.

You can keep using the old slow ARC. We'll save that online for legacy projects. The new ARCx won't be compatible with old ARC projects. We looked into some way to migrate the projects but it'll be impossible due to the way ARCx stores files. The current ARC uses XML to store the project settings, and then each robot skill has encoded settings. When the current ARC loads a project, it has to load the entire XML file and parse it into an object of duplicate size, doubling the RAM usage. It's very inefficient.

Also, because each robot skill saves its settings into a custom format based on the author, there are no "transferrable settings" to map between ARC and ARCx.

But it should be mostly copying and pasting because the robot skills from ARC are in ARCx, so you should be able to copy and paste your code. Although there is no EZScript in ARCx (sorry), we had to pull the plug on it eventually. EZScript dated back to the original EZBuilder and had too many dependencies that were incompatible with ARCx's new framework.

Either way, I can assure you that ARCx is pretty wild. The best part is loading it onto a Raspberry Pi and using my iPhone or laptop to program the robot remotely!

The new ControlCommand is also better - it does much more, even though it's compatible with the previous version.

Other than a million new features, there aren't many significant changes. What comes to mind are.

• 3d designer has been removed
• ezscript removed
• remote UI has been removed because the entire ARCx is web-based already, so it's redundant

I think that's it. I can't give you a list of new features because the list would be too long.

I understand that well. Backwards compatibility can also sometimes be a brake on innovation.

For me it  seems to make sense to concentrate on the physical structure of the robot including the integration of the head, eys, cameras, microphones, etc. until ARCx is released.

As soon as ARCx is available (hopefully in March /beta Version?) I will start building the application.

Probably on Raspberry PI5 with SSD.

Basic functional tests can still be carried out with the current version.

Working on various parts and building the physical robot is a good idea. We'll have the ARCx platform framework completed in March and several robot skills ported. It'll be initially the most popular robot skills at first, probably one or two per day after that. There are a few hundred robot skills to port from ARC to ARCx, so we hope to complete them before June/July.

Wow love the robot thanks for showcasing it @Robo-Chess.

@DJ I appreciate EZ-Script is going away but if you could keep something like Blockly (Scratch-JS ?) would be nice.  Memory doesn’t function as well as it used to so it’s often quicker and easier just to do simple things in Blockly then try and workout syntax.

Yeah, Blockly is still there. But EZ-Script had to die, haha. I was throwing some ideas around for an EZScript to JavaScript converter, which I think should be possible. I'm guessing it might just be a webpage on the synthiam website that you paste ezscript into and it'll output javascript.

I know I keep talking about how awesome ARCx is, but boy, is it ever wild. I was using it today, testing the camera features. While there is not much more than a streaming video at this point, it's so wild to view the robot's skill from my phone, laptop, TV browser, etc... It's unbelievable how cool it is!

Also, the whole video system backend is OpenCV, so it's very extendable for compatibility. It's just wild, wild, wild, wild!

The thing I think you're all going to like a lot is the naming of ports. When you select ports for servos, etc., you can give them names referenced across all robot skills. Here's an example where I named the servo port Vertical Servo. So, all robot skills where you select the servo will display the port number and the name you give it.

Sorry, small screenshot. You must click on it and zoom in on the port name to see it.

Wait, is EZ-Script going away? Sure hope not. Its the only one I'm able to actually understand to program. Not a fan of the blocky or java really. Please dont kill DJ, unless your ogonna create something like EZ-Java or something. Heck, id love to see a return to BASIC even