all!
I'm trying to run programs to control stepper motors. The PC and software and stepper motor controller I have already in place are pretty old and I'm new to almost everything I'm doing here-learning as I go sort of thing. I've 'coded' a bit in Matlab, so I have a very basic level of coding logic, but basically no knowledge of any common syntax. So, I know some about the steppers and the stepper controller, but not much else!
I have a program called "Hoop.exe" that I'm trying to modify to slow down the speed of one of the steppers (I just need to change a 300 to a 200!) when I run the program. There is also an associated (assuming) hoop.bas and a hoop.txt file on the floppy disc. From looking at the txt file, it looks like basic code from examples of basic I've seen. I'm working with visual basic 2.0 and qbasic 1.1 on Windows 98.
So, I tried opening the hoop.bas file first with qbasic and with vb. With qb, I get a 'bad file mode' message. With vb, I get 'invalid file format' and it seems it wants me to open a mak file but I have no 'hoop.mak'. I did this thinking that I could open the bas file with vb or qb, and then edit it, and then save it as an exe, and then run that.
I found a pdf that showed how to incorporate a qb file into the command button of vb, and I tried that. But, I got an "Expected: end of statement" error in the first line! when I tried to save it as an exe.
So, all I really want to do is change my hoop.exe. I would assume that since qb and vb are both on the PC, one of them wrote the bas (maybe not!), so I'm wondering why neither of them can read it.
I've never used vb or qb, but if I have to get into the nitty gritty, it seems like I'd rather use qbasic, since I've never used a graphical interface to code before. But, is either one of those necessary in order to do what I want to do? (I'm going to need to write some programs to control these steppers when all is said and done, but I figured that I should take it one step at a time.)
I tried some form of copying and pasting into qb, but I couldn't immediately figure out how to do that. (Probably because I have no idea how to use qb.)
So, what would be the most efficient way to modify my hoop program?
If the answer is that I just need to learn basic with qb, that's fine, but I'd like to get some sort of indication from people who know what they're talking about before I put that much effort in.
I would really appreciate any pointers because I'm apparently completely clueless on my own!
8/10/2013:
Just in case it's helpful, here are some lines from the Hoop.txt I opened:
10 CLS : CLEAR 1000: P = 512
20 LOCATE , , 1
100 A% = INKEY$: PRINT A$;
105 IF A$ = "*" THEN GOTO 700
110 GOSUB 510: GOSUB 610: GOTO 100
500 REM
510 IF A$ = "" THEN RETURN
etc. This is the beginning of the interface code that allows me to talk to the motor controller
QuickBASIC and Visual Basic are very different, despite their common name of "BASIC" and despite the fact they were both made by Microsoft. First you need to determine if the .BAS file is QuickBASIC or Visual Basic. A simple quick way (though not the most accurate) is to open the file up in Notepad or some other text editor. If keywords such as "OPEN" or "LEN" or "MID" or "CLOSE" are in uppercase, then its more likely a QuickBASIC file. If the keywords look more like "Open" or "Close" or "Len" or "Mid", then its more likely a Visual Basic file.
Now keep in mind that there are other versions of BASIC that have been developed, such as Turbo BASIC (Borland's version) or GW-BASIC or BasicA or PowerBASIC and even Color Basic.
Now if you can't figure it out this way, the next thing I'd suggest is downloading a hex editor, such as XVI32 (though there are many other free ones out there). Look through the file (especially towards the end of the file) and there are usually signs that indicate what kind of compiler was used. You might see the words "Microsoft Basic Compiler" or "Borland Turbo Compiler". Usually towards the end of the file, there are string "stubs" put in by the compiler or linker that you can use to determine the compiler.
If all that fails and you are desperate and that "300" number is hard coded in the program and you need to change it, then there is another way to do this. First back up your original exe file. Then Use XVI32 or some other hex editor and search for the string "2c01" (300 is 012c hex and you need to reverse the 01 and 2c since Intel machines are little-endian). Once you find an instance of 2c01, change it to "c800" (200 is 00c8. Little Endian version would be c800). Save the file, then rerun it. This is a gruesome trial and error way to fix this. If it was changed from 300 to 200, then everything is good! If not, restore from your backup and try again!
Have you considered getting an Arduino or some other low cost and friendly electronics development platform? I think it would be the way to go for you to control stepper motors...
take a look:
http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/StepperUnipolar
If you google around you'll find tons of you tube videos showing off some arduino controlled stuff.
Modifying your current .exe seems to me a too long and hard path to follow instead of making your own and proper source code for achieving what you want, as you would need to disassemble the executable file and literally "know what you're doing" with all that assembly language to find where to patch the binary with the right value.
Anyway, if you post a picture or a schematic of your old hardware I could try to help you a little more, but I guess that would be better suited to this other stack exchange site:
http://electronics.stackexchange.com
Related
I am an absolute beginner to this Netlogo software and have no programming experience whatsoever on it. I am using a sample program provided with the software to run a science experiment and I just want the raw data to use for a project but I do not know how to acquire it. I heard I need to use an output-print command but I am not sure how to do this. Any help would be appreciated.
Dana, if you need to run multiple replicates I would check out Behavior Space. It is part of Netlogo (Tools -> Behavior Space) and allows you to easily save the output to a .csv file.
If you just want a quick and not-so-pretty data out, you could do something like:
to setup
ca
reset-ticks
end
to go
tick
print-to-file
end
to print-to-file
file-open "example.csv"
file-type (word ticks ",\n");; replace ticks with the variable you want out
file-close
end
Which appends your output to the file "example.csv".
I apologize if this this is an extremely amateur question. But before yesterday I had never even heard to tex, latex, mactex, all this stuff.
Basically I have cloned a git repo in which the UML documents appear to be in a .tex file. Following google, this has led me to install MacTex, try to open these files. Click 'typeset' which I presume is how it produces the document, but it gives an error about 'uml2' being invalid syntax.
What program, or what anything, am I supposed to use to open a .tex file which has stuff like this in it:
\tikzstyle{uml2} = [
fill=rupBody,
draw=rupBorder,
font={\ttfamily},
]
Is this even something your supposed to open in a program and view visually? I suppose this file named uml.tex will show a UML diagram once opened. Or do I have completely the wrong idea? Sorry if this is extremely amateur, like I said I've never heard of this since before yesterday, and google isn't turning up lots of information on this. Any direction would be much appreciated.
You need to install pgf from http://ctan.org/pkg/pgf The easiest is to use TexLive. Once you got all packages installed you can typeset the TeX file. I'm using TexShop which is a nice app for the Mac.
Since you indicate you never heard of TeX before: TeX is a program written by Donald Knuth many, many years ago when computers were engined with steam. But it's the best you can find for typesetting. It's mature, crude and more than 99,99% error free. Donald Knuth has a bounty for each error you find in the code and he did not have to pay since many years. What you do is to create those TeX files (there are different macro packages were LaTeX is the most famous) and send them to the TeX processor. That will create the output (now its PDF and formerly it was some DIV (device independent viewer IIRC)).
Edit I downloaded tikz-uml from here: http://perso.ensta-paristech.fr/~kielbasi/tikzuml/index.php and moved the tikz-uml.sty to folder where the main .tex source is placed. After including
\usepackage{tikz-uml}
in the header I was able to compile the source.
Note: there is a global location for .sty files but that depends in the app you use. Use Google to find this place. But putting .sty near your .tex is fine anyway. A \usepackage directive first looks in the source folder before looking into the global ones.
I was using notepad++ to create a report and its taking a quite a while for me to type and do so.
Well i had tried a software called typing assistant it was really good(except for the money part :D).
TO the Point :
is there any way tat i can link a dict(text file of words) and use notepad ++ as typing assistant please tell me if so i
can speed my report.
Cause i am a programmer too so i really like the keyword completion and stuff .But is there a way to use it for text ?
already tried Phrase Express -.-:
Takes long and its kinda for macro text and text completion don't work tat fast for me to tab and complete
if there's a question in the form like mine link me to tat :
i searched it and i didn't get it
Yes, you can set up your own custom auto-complete dictionaries in notepad++. You need to create an xml file with your language name and put it under the plugins/APIs directory in notepad++. Of course this assumes you know how to write xml. There's a formal description of how to implement this here.
I've never tried to create an auto-complete dictionary for plain text files, so I'm not sure if it's possible, but I have successfully created them for user-defined languages, which you could also do if you can't get it to work with text files.
I'm not sure if this question is really a duplicate, but here is a very similar one, which may help you in your research.
I'm trying to localize a large MFC project where all the strings are hard-coded into the source code. (It was the easiest thing to do at the time, back before we had any idea we'd expand into other markets.) I've looked at localization tools, and invariably they say to put all the strings into the .rc file first, or just assume it has been done. Of the ones I've checked, appTranslator is the only one that even hints it may be a problem, and provides a couple of convenience functions to cut down on the wordiness of the resulting source code.
Does anybody have a better idea than going through hundreds of files manually, and making the occasional mistake along the way?
Is there some sort of product out there to help?
Does anybody have experience with doing this?
It is a tedious process to be sure. I participated in an effort like this many years ago. We did it manually. You can probably write some common code that makes the loading, checking, etc all pretty clean with minimal bloat.
I don't know of any products that will do it for you.
CStrings might be your friend - using the LoadString() member.
I would either derive from CString or write some other code that encapsulates default values (their current hard-coded values probably) and other error conditions and then use that in place of the hard-coded strings.
If you prefer not to use CString, then deriving from std::string and using the global LoadString() works fine too.
as for tools:
not sure they will work for your case:
http://www.modelmakertools.com/articles/hard-coded-strings.html
apparently this tool can find all the strings in your exe files:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Then you can search for them and replace.
I think writing a tool would be fairly straightforward - look for " character and then create an entry in an rc file that corresponds to the .cpp or .h file it came from. You will have a lot of culling to do, but it is a start. You can do a replace of the text, or insert comments, etc. You can use the line number and file name for the resource id/name in a #include.
I know it's too late but just for the search engine.
There is a feature of CString to initialize it from a resource ID.
CString((LPCTSTR)IDS_RESOURCE_ID)
I need to be able to GZip compress a file in an Excel VBA function. Specifically I need to be able to use the 'deflate' algorithm.
Is there a way to do this without having to exec a command line application? With no dependency on external tools the code will be more robust.
Ideally the code would make use of pre-installed VBA or COM library functions - I don't want to have to implement this logic myself or install DLLs etc.
If possible, I want installation of the function to be as simple as adding a .xla to the available Excel Add-Ins. No DLLs, EXEs, registry entries etc. required.
Edit Can I make use of the .NET GZipStream to do this?
VBA (which is really a dialect of VB6) is slow for these kind of applications. I remember I once implemented Shannon-Fano algorithm on VB6 and on C, the C version was about 10 times faster, even after being turned into a DLLMain and called from there rather than on a command-line executable.
There are lots of COM DLLs that provide compression services, both open source and shareware, and some of them implement GZIP's deflate algorithm. It'd be really simple to just call one function from such a DLL from your VBA code to do the compression on your behalf.
I understand your being reluctant on using something external to your application, though in this case you might have to apply an exception for performance's sake.
In an effort to completely spoil your fun, examine file ZIPFLDR.DLL on windows\system32. you may also like to take a look at these links:
This has an example of how to do what you want (zipping using windows built-in ZIP capabilities) from VB.NET, it shouldn't be much different from VBA or VB6:
Transparent ZIP with DLL call
This one has a sample application on VB6 using windows built-in capabilities to zip (in ZIP rather than GZIP format, of course): Using Windows XP "Compressed Folder" shell extension to work with .zip files
Found both thru googling, you should be able to find more/better examples.
OK, I think I have an answer for you.
zlib is a library written by the guy that wrote the deflate algorithm you don't want to implement. There is a win32 DLL available. Here's the FAQ regarding using it from Windows:
http://www.zlib.net/DLL_FAQ.txt
Check out question 7. The authors don't seem too keen on Windows users, and don't seem at all keen on VB users, but as long as they're kind enough to provide the library we can do the rest.
If this is enough to help you, then great. If you want help with calling the C library from VBA add a comment and we'll figure it out. I haven't done any VB-to-C calls in years--it sounds like fun.
It seems that you want to open a bottle of wine but you definitly refuse to use a bottle-opener. As long as there is no VBA function allowing the GZipping of a file, you will not be able to do the job without some external ressource such as a dll or exe file.
If somebody wanted to compress files without relying on 3rd-party software they would generally implement it as a COM object/DLL so it would be available to more than just Excel. If somebody wanted to incorporate zip functionality into Excel they would use 3rd-party tools so they wouldn't have to re-implement the algorithm. So you're swimming against the tide. However...
http://www.cpearson.com/excel/SaveCopyAndZip.htm
There are two versions. The COM Add-in version "...allows you to zip any workbook that has been saved to disk (but it may be in an unsaved state)." It relies on a Moonlight Software component but all the components and set-up are contained in the installer. It's not quite public domain but the license is less restrictive than the GPL. The end result is an Excel add-in (that uses a 3rd-party component).
But if you really, truly don't want any dependencies on external tools you're either going to have to implement the compression algorithm yourself or wait until Microsoft builds that functionality into Windows and exposes it through Excel.
I hope this helps.
If you want to implement the algorithm in VBA, you would need to (in VBA) save the spreadsheet and then use VB's I/O functions to open the file, deflate it, and save it again. For all intents and purposes it's identical to writing an ordinary VB application that works on a file. You might need to put the VBA macro in a separate workbook to avoid "file in use" types of errors, but if you reopen the file as read-only and save it with a different filename you should be OK keeping everything in one workbook.
But I'm almost certain that shelling out to gzip from within the VBA would be functionally identical and infinitely easier.
EDIT: Some code. It didn't fail when I ran it, so it's OK to keep everything in the same workbook.
Sub main()
ActiveWorkbook.Save
Open "macrotest.xls" For Binary Access Read As #1
Open "newfile.zip" For Binary Access Write As #2
'do your stuff here
Close #2
Close #1
End Sub