Yes, this is a hardware project, and there will be robots, and things to try to get robots to do, and this project page will be updated regularly, if not daily, during the contest period.  So stay tuned!

Imagine a robot that uses a Propeller chip as its brain, and if the robot has a program where it tries to map out a maze that it is trying to solve; wouldn't it be nice to be able to "see" into the "mind" of the robot, at it builds its "world view model or database!?"

On the software side, you will need Visual Studio 2005 or later to compile the source files. Simply create an MFC project that supports Document/View Architecture with the Multiple Document and Multiple View settings, and then incorporate components that you are interested in from this repository. Thus, the purpose of this application is, in part, to provide some supportive tech to those who might already have a working application in the pipeline, but who are also fighting some show-stoppers issue(s) that are preventing their bespoke application's proper integration into a GUI based environment.

Note that the full Graphical Debug protocol provided by PNUT (which is a separate commercial product provided by Parallax) is not yet fully working but is a work in progress. The GUI portion is working, but there are still some issues with managing the message map architecture, i.e., the message crackers and translators that will route Parallax debugging protocol messages to the correct GDI or OpenGL components. This will eventually be done in a sub-dialect of Lisp, called "Frame Lisp".

In the meantime, you can nonetheless access the native FORTH interpreter which is built into the Parallax P2 Propeller chip directly, or you can upload binary images built with other tool sets - so that you can use applications built with other compilers/tools with this framework, and then interact with those programs using a GDI aware terminal program that you have the source code to and which can be customized as you see fit.

To get the oscilloscope features and other graphical debugging features you will need to include a library called Frame Lisp, which has not yet published, as it is being updated for Unicode support, and undergoing further debugging. This will be remedied in a future update, "real soon now." In the meantime, the boilerplate needed for MFC based Document-View architecture is functional to the point of being able to upload binaries to the propeller P2 hardware and interact in text mode via keyboard and mouse if desired, as well as create and manage multiple debugging windows.

Port speeds of up to 3Mbits/sec. are known to be reliable with the available and tested hardware. If you are not wanting to wait for Frame Lisp, you can also find some assembly language code written by Chip Gracey at Parallax, which was published along with the original Delphi code mid-summer of 2020 and made available on the Parallax forums. The original assembly language routines could be reworked and recompiled under MASM, and then linked to their corresponding C++ counterparts, instead of the original Delphi.

Eventually I will be adding additional features, such as Audio/MIDI streaming, more fully functional oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer modes, OpenGL support, as well as project management and library management functions, all within a GUI environment that will immediately seem familiar to anyone who has used an IDE in the past.