I've been busy over the past few days studying the Picaxe manuals and trying to understand the coding. I keep reading about how easy it is and it's even called basic, but my problem is, I don't understand any of it.
My electrical and mechanical skills are enough to get me by, but this programming makes no sense to me what so ever.
I've Googled in an attemp to find online tutorials, that doesn't seem to help either.
Can anyone explain how they learned the Picaxe basic coding? That might help me.
There is no good answer, you just have to put in the time. It took me 2 years to become “fluent” in picaxe basic. Start with the tutorials, build upon them and you will get it.
Ran through the tutorials on the first manual and used the emulator to see what my code was doing visually.
It’s all about baby steps and writing/testing your code. Make a led blink once…test it in the emulator…make it blink twice, test it…make it blink via some type of loop…test it…make it blink via loop using a function…test it…
I had BASIC experience from the old TI-99 days. Mmm… saving data on cassette tapes… but I digress. It is about little successes. I even had to get blinky lights going when I revived the love (tolerance?) for BASIC with my PICAXE interest. In this case I would recommend getting your feet fully in the water with the Start Here Robot (the cheaper IR version). It gives you a good foundation for the basics of robotics with Fritzel’s well-commented code. A little A-D stuff, some L293 motor stuff, etc. You don’t have to necessarily buy the exact board that he has. You can get away with even less like I did and learn things along the way.
Then follow with adding a blinky LED. Or make it beep at you. Add a couple CdS cells to keep it out of dark areas. A lot of code snippets from the manuals can be added to your own code and modified to fit your pin arrangement or what-have-you.
A guy called hippy and another guy named Peter H. Anderson in the PICAXE community have got a lot of good stuff on the web. It got me over a couple humps of understanding. Good beginner resources, IMO. Anderson sells PICAXE and other stuff too, just FYI.
