pbLua Beta 16a - Now With Reliable Consoles!

[Ralph Hempel <rhempel@...>]

It's been a while since my last update on this list, so if
you are receiving this note and do not want any more, please
send me a reply and I'll be happy to remove you from the list.

Now that that's out of the way, I'd like to announce that
thanks to Philippe Hurbain's special project I've
been a bit more active in the development of pbLua lately.

Philo's website is a great LEGO RCX and NXT technical reference:
<http://www.philohome.com>

We're now at Beta-16a - very, very close to a 1.0 release.

Website:
<http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbLua>

Firmware:
<http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbLua/gems/nxt-lua-beta-16a.zip>

The tutorials have all been reviewed for errors again, and I'll
be adding some more over the next few weeks.

Here's what's been improved in the firmware:

1. BT and USB Consoles now works MUCH better. I can send a 45K C
   file to the console and pbLua interprets it (as junk) and
   sends back errors for every line.

   That's expected :-) But the important thing is that it
   does not crash.

2. Added some more initialization to the motors and tuned the
   driver. Now the first regulated motor command works
   properly.

3. Added (experimentally) the Lua debug library. This allows
   you to do stuff like set Lua hooks to run every n instructions
   so that you can break out of endless loops using the keyboard!

4. Fixed the RS485 routines to not crash if you send data before
   initializing the port to a baud rate,

Please download the latest version and upgrade, and be sure to
email me with questions or comments!

Cheers, Ralph