Confusing Help description for GNU Octave remote API

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Intars
Posts: 2
Joined: 11 May 2020, 14:53

Confusing Help description for GNU Octave remote API

Post by Intars »

My greetings to folks in this forum.
First time posting here, so few briefs words about me. I am not totally new to V-REP (now CoppeliaSim).
I study in university in robotics/AI course and was introduced to V-REP two years ago in third semester.
Happened to like this virtual robot prototyping program and started slowly to learn it for my personal
projects and aiming for its usage after the university.

But at the same time i am currently not a seasoned user (due to university time constraints). For now
in one specific our last semester's course "Intelligent electronics for robots" i had one homework assignment
which required to interface and connect "Webots" virtual robot platform with Matlab and script some things
around fuzzy logic.

Of course, i had to and decided to become a dissident and go towards pipeline of V-REP + GNU Octave.
That's because precisely that pipeline i intend to develop and try to master after the university for my personal
projects and experiments. And for the first time i had to try to do some interfacing. As a complete beginner in this
procedure i stumbled upon confusing moment in official Help documentation:

It mentions 4 files but one line below we see only two:
Image
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sy8ojf5420tqk ... s.JPG?dl=0


But in folders ( for V-REP PRO EDU 3.5.0. (rev.4) ) there are 4 files indeed:
Image
https://www.dropbox.com/s/g8j87bxnj307c ... s.JPG?dl=0

Before whole process came to generation of .oct file in a working directory location, i copied all 8 files instead of
a mentioned mystical 4 files. I was lucky enough (and by using instructions given in buildWin.m scriptfile) to
somehow arrive at somewhat successfully generated .oct file and even workable connection between V-REP and Octave
through demo SimpleTest.m script; in V-REP i can see "Hello V-REP!" in console, sent from Octave and accompanying
functionality of mouse X coordinates tracking displayed in Octave terminal. So far so good.

My question is as follows - due to brutal approach of copying all 8 files from above showcased V-REP installation directories, am i on the road towards problems and "underwater minefield" later on? Did i already broke or violated something? As i imagine, interfacing two such complex programs is a very fragile and error-prone process - miss one file or add too much irrelevant, incompatible files and later on it may manifest itself as unworkable setup or strange errors.

For other people, maybe beginners like me, who tries to achieve the same, i post image which shows that
interfacing V-REP with Octave on simple level works after all. At the bottom left in terminal output we truly
can see "Hello V-REP" as well as mouse X coordinates in Octave terminal (as it supposed to be).
- - - - - - - - - - -
I might add that this is a brave and intellectually powerful step from developers to enable and at least
try to add ways for inclusion of open-source numeric and scientific calculation software GNU Octave instead
of only Matlab.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Image
https://www.dropbox.com/s/enl5tkarn5alc ... 9.jpg?dl=0
(Currently i work on Win10 HP EliteBook series notebook, with 64-bit V-REP PRO EDU 3.5.0.)

coppelia
Site Admin
Posts: 10336
Joined: 14 Dec 2012, 00:25

Re: Confusing Help description for GNU Octave remote API

Post by coppelia »

Hello,

you are using an old CoppeliaSim version. But at the same time, Octave is the interface that would again require some work on it (mainly the documentation), to bring it up-to-date.
But your approach is correct. We are actually still hoping that in near future the same files as for Matlab could be used with Octave, if or when Octave becomes truely exchangeable with Matlab...

Cheers

Intars
Posts: 2
Joined: 11 May 2020, 14:53

Re: Confusing Help description for GNU Octave remote API

Post by Intars »

Ou, so i wasn't far from correct way of doing things... good to know. Thanks
for clarification.
As for GNU Octave, i am certainly not a main character to speak about their
future plans and intentions on compatibility thou it could be interesting to
hear anything from insider's perspective by any chance. Is that possible that
their developers aren't even aware of V-REP and Octave pipeline "bridging" efforts?

As a novice user i might even ask, i guess - who's accomplishment is the current
remote API?

coppelia
Site Admin
Posts: 10336
Joined: 14 Dec 2012, 00:25

Re: Confusing Help description for GNU Octave remote API

Post by coppelia »

We developed the Octave remote API interface. We started this back in 2012 approximately, and have since then not modified much. So there is probably a lot of room for improvement, since Octave has moved quite far since then.

Cheers

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