About Spirit.ocx; Calling Spirit.ocx Functions - LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots Manual

with more bells and whistles, is available for $279Us. If you have more money to burn, try the "Enterprise Edition," for $1299US.
Don't be alarmed by the price tags. You may already have Visual Basic without knowing it. The applications in the Microsoft Office software include a limited version of Visual Basic, called
Visual Basic for Applications (VBA); Word, Excel, and Access all include VBA. In Word, for example, there's a Visual Basic Editor menu item in the Macro submenu of the Tools menu. The
examples in this chapter were developed with VBA in Microsoft Word 97, but you could just as easily use one of the other incarnations of VB or VBA.
Even if you don't have VB or VBA, you can use a very similar environment called BrickCommand. BrickCommand allows you to program the RCX via Spirit.ocx, much the same way as you
would using VB or VBA. Several similar packages are available online; see the "Online Resources" section for details.

About Spirit.ocx

Spirit.ocx is the glue that links Windows applications to the RCX. If you installed the software from the RIS kit, you already have Spirit.ocx on your computer. In essence, Spirit.ocx is a collection
of functions that send commands to the RCX, ask the RCX for information, or create programs on the RCX. Figure 8-1 shows the software architecture, which is quite similar to Figure 4-1 in
Chapter 4. Spirit.ocx can also be used from Visual C++ (VC++). If you're familiar with VC++, you can do this fairly easily. This chapter describes VB because it is simple and commonly available.
Like NQC, Spirit.ocx uses the default firmware that is loaded on the RCX and makes more features of the bytecode interpreter available than RCX Code. Unlike NQC, Spirit.ocx is a Windows-
specific piece of software.

Calling Spirit.ocx Functions

The goal of this chapter is to enable you to call Spirit.ocx functions directly from VB or VBA with code like this:
.InitComm
.PlayTone 440, 10
.SetWatch Hour (Now), Minute (Now)
.On "01"
All you need to do is let VB know about the Spirit.ocx control. This process is described in the next few sections.
First Things First
Figure 8-1.
RCX software architecture
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