Re: [BLACKBOX] Still kicking the BlackBox tires. A question for the group about annoyances.

From: [at]} <Wojtek>
Date: Fri, 9 Mar 2012 22:40:27 -0500

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Lon:

I have one observation to share with you. It is not an "annoyance" by any
means. It works as designed, but it sometimes gets in the way. Namely, BB
is a user-mode IDE and operating environment in one. It works in the user
space and it is hard to get it any deeper into the Windows OS. Granted, it
has a rich Windows API that allows you to call the OS functions, what some
people here do. I do not, because till now I was interfacing with the
Windows guts via DLLs. My problem is that the BB works off the GUI clock
which is up to 100 Hz. (Slower by default, but you can change a const
somewhere, recompile the system, and the clock freq can be increased to
100 Hz).

Calling the inner loop every 10 ms is fine for most apps, but not for all.
For example, the USB heartbeat is 1 ms. It means that you either have to
buffer your data inside the USB device, or you have to use LibUSB to do
your work under the hood, or both. And this means C.

I am not expecting BB to become a hard real time system. It is probably
not possible. It is just an observation that BB is great for most things
concerning the GUI, but it has some limitations when it comes to the data
acquisition.

We are actually using BB for DAQ and in all likelihood we will continue
using it. One has to get used to buffering and to using C for low-level
stuff.

It would be great if low-level Windows functionality could be programmed
in Component Pascal, but this probaly has to wait till Windows Release 999
or so.

Just my 2 cents.

W.

> Having groveled about a bit more with Blackbox, I'm still convinced it's a
> thing
> worth studying more. I have run into no killer annoyances, but have made
> a
> list of things I'd like to see tweaked or enhanced.
>
> Rather than list those now, I'd like to ask the much more experienced
> (essentially everyone else on this list, unless I miss my guess)
> what things annoy you during development that you've not found relatively
> easy solutions to.
>
> I've read DragonCity, so there's one source of problems, but would like to
> hear
> of others. The email archive stuff posted a while back was by no
> means complete;
> I was reading very early stuff going back to the 1990s.
>
> I'm thinking of doing a projet to remedy at least one annoyance as a way
> of
> learning more than "Hello Wolrd" tied to widgets.
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Lon
>
>
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Received on Sat Mar 10 2012 - 04:40:27 UTC