Sharing

Sharing source code

The most straightforward way to share a robot that you coded yourself is of course to just share the program source code. This also keeps all comments, labels and other helpful things (e.g. indentation) in place, so others can better understand what your program does. http://gist.github.com/ is pretty useful for this (although you can of course just copy-paste the code).

Sharing ROM

The Robot menu of the sandbox has different tools for sharing robot ROMs (like those created by the Genetics module).

Note the difference between RAM and ROM in this context: ROM is what you load into a robot (i.e. a binary program), while RAM is what the memory of the robot looks like at a given point in time (e.g. modified during execution).

There is only one ROM in the sandbox, and it is changed by these things:

• Flashing a program onto the robot, either from the code editor or from the Genetics module (Flash Best).

• Load ROM... in the Robot menu. This loads a binary file whose bytes directly represent the ROM. Such files can be created by Save ROM....

• Paste ROM in the Robot menu. Use this to load a ROM created by Copy ROM, which is a base64 string encoding of the ROM. This is a very convenient option for sharing ROMs through e.g. text chat.

Whatever the current ROM is in the sandbox, it can be flashed onto the robot with Flash (f) in the Robot menu.

You can also turn the current ROM back into more readable source code by decompiling it (check the Tools menu in the code editor). Note that it's impossible to restore the exact original source, since e.g. any 4 bytes could represent some commands or a float constant - and as a matter of fact, they could be used as both in the same program!