[chbot] Simple robot programming

[Charles Manning]

Morris and I had a very interesting conversation about simplifying
robot programming.

Many people are drawn to Mindstorms-like drag and drop programming.
This is indeed a simple way to do very simple programming (but is
hopeless for anything of reasonable complexity). These tools are also
no open source or free.

Fortuitously I got into a discussion with Timothy about PLC "ladder
logic" programming. This could be a simple way to do very simple
programs. There are a few very interesting open source ladder logic
projects out there that compile a ladder and generate a "byte code"
which runs on a tiny interpreter. These can be simple enough to run on
a small AVR, moderate PIC, Linux box etc. Anything that can eat C.

Ladder logic is a graphical representation of an electrical circuit
that operates on inputs and outputs
eg.
 |     IN1   IN2  OUT1  |
+-----[ ]---[ ]---( )------+
|                                |

If IN1 is on and IN2 is on then turn on output 1.

Better descriptions in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladder_logic

A ladder logic tool I'm going to look at more is at http://www.cq.cx/ladder.pl

--Charles