Revolution Live Core Day 2
Day 2 of the core Revolution Live conference continues.
The morning begins at 9:30 AM with groups splitting between an Organizing Your Code II session run by Ken Ray of Sons of Thunder Software and a Files and Documents session. I sat in Ken Ray’s session, where he reviewed a variety of products such as The Scripter’s Scrapbook for organizing your code for easy reuse. This product supports 17 different languages, including Revolution, and has a feature that lets you search various vendor mailing lists for terms.
Ken followed this up with a discussion on how arrays work in Revolution. He discussed how he has his own notation for differentiating between arrays based on their scope. Later, Ken compared how arrays work in Revolution compared with other languages.
Then, he covered how custom properties work. Revolution internally uses a “c” to denote custom properties. He cautioned that “is among the keys” for poling for custom keys or properties doesn’t apply to customKeys. He then demonstrated how you can store anything in a custom property, including additional stacks. Finally, he discussed how you can trap a getProp message and have your stack modify it.
10:40 AM
Phil Davis presents Working with USB Devices and Revolution. Phil has extensive background in connecting custom USB devices to educational titles. Phil first describes just how complicated the USB spec is, and in this presentation discusses storage and communication. There are four different transfer modes supported for transferring information. Fortunately, Phil describes that you do not need to know the specs to work with USB and Revolution.
You can poll for Vendor ID, Product Name, Product ID and Serial Number to control use of your stack. This information is available on every OS, but every OS manages it differently. He went on to show how Windows stores this information in the registry, and how to query the registry from Revolution. On Mac OS X, there is a system utility to retrieve information about USB devices that’s accessible through a command line. Phil has created a library to work with USB devices that is freely available on his website. He also briefly covered USB Communications Class device, showing a USB RCS Servo Controller for working with USB cameras and other robotic devices.
