The EV3 blocks for the dGPS contained the GPS Read block only, all other blocks available for NXT are missing. Is there a reason for this? Especially the GPS Navigation block was very useful.
Hey Schollibotics, indeed, the navigation blocks are missing from the EV3 set. The primary reason is that developing for the EV3 system is pretty difficult and the more advanced blocks can be found in RobotC. You can find them here.
Hi John,
Problem is, we are using EV3 in school and we cannot afford RobotC Licenses. With their new licensing model, we would Need to pay several hundered Euros (or Dollars) per year , which is certainly not in the school’s budget.
Many schools in our region have the same problem and need to stay with the Lego IDE.
Why is the Navigation Block so difficult, when you are able to read out the current GPS position properly (which must be the case for the GPS Read Block) and have another given Position from the Input wires? Isn’t this just a math problem? However, a math that my 12 year old students cannot solve themselves.
Hey Schollibotics, I understand your plight and I’m really sorry about the inconvenience of not having this specific block. Do you have any NXT’s available, we still have the software available for them.
I’ll try to explain the problem, but I don’t know if I can do it justice. The latest LEGO software for writing blocks for the EV3 is terrible. The previous version for the NXT was hard to use and develop for, but the back-end was supported by Labview, had decent documentation. It could handle floating point integers for example. It had predictable type casting of integers to floating point. The current version has none of these things. The programming environment is not only painful to use (not your problem, but mine), it doesn’t have a decent outline of how the different functions work, or of how to use floating point numbers.
We’ve tried a few times to contact National Instruments for support, and their response has been that lego developed this software on their own and they can’t support it. Lego has no response when we ask questions. As you can see, we haven’t put out any new lego hardware since because it’s incredibly painful (and sometimes impossible) to try to support the software.
I hope the explanation helps.
Best,
John