v2.0.0 released

I've been using v2.0 with no serious issues for a bit now, so let's just make it official.

$ md5sum fexcel.exe
8952c0ef17ee5b4a7e7835ef8543a1e9 *fexcel.exe

v2.0.0-beta.9

see https://github.com/onerobotics/fexcel/releases/tag/v2.0.0-beta.10

v2.0.0 Beta

I moved the project over to a private repo over a year ago to work on some new features with the hopes of eventually creating a commercial product.... and quickly lost interest.

So here we are 1.5 years later with a free open-source beta release of fexcel 2.0 with several new features:

command	description
compile	forget about data/IO locations in your LS source files
create	quickly create a fexcel spreadsheet from an existing robot's data
diff	compare a spreadsheet to a robot's comments

The feature I'm most excited about is the compiler. It offers a few HUGE benefits when writing FANUC TP programs by hand:

1. You don't have to worry about the locations of your data (e.g. R[x], PR[y], DI[z]). Just use the names you've defined in your spreadsheet (e.g. R{counter}, PR{home}, DI{okToEnter})
2. It was easy to have dangerous typos in TP programs before e.g.:

Source code:

J PR[2:home] 100% CNT0 ;

After loading to the robot:

J PR[2:ThroughTheFloor] 100% CNT0;

Turns out home was actually PR[1]. I got the comment correct but mis-typed the index. Oops.

The compiler catches typos and undefined names. This also allows you to safely remove comments from your master spreadsheet without wondering if those items are being used somewhere.

3. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's occasionally used numeric registers for things that really should be constants. It's ok for ME to change these values, but I would not want an operator to change these things during production. You can now define constants in your spreadsheet and use them in your program:

Constants	value
HomeSpeed	25
HomeCNT	0

J PR{Home} ${HomeSpeed}% CNT${HomeCNT} ;

There may be issues, so please give it a try and use the issue tracker.

> md5sum fexcel.exe
2e97d95e72a1d687229f86c75db6f187 *fexcel.exe

Big reorganization

Functionality is largely the same, but the code is a lot cleaner. I think the output/reporting is a bit cleaner now too, hence the bump to v1.2.0.

v1.1.0

fexcel is now faster! Multiple host updates are now done concurrently.

The task status reporting has been simplified, and fexcel now checks for updates after every succesful run. (This can be disabled with the new noUpdate flag.)

v1.0.0

Stable v1.0.0 release. Checks the GitHub releases API for updates. See README for details and usage.

v1.0.0-beta.6

Checks to make sure the filename provided ends in .xlsx

v1.0-beta.5

You can now optionally override the default sheet when specifying starting cells.

e.g. fexcel -sheet Data -posregs A2 -dins IO:A2 ...

v1.0 beta-4

Added some better error reporting to comtool and added an optional timeout flag with a default value of 500ms.

v1.0 beta-3 Update

Added a warning when comments are longer than the maximum allowed length.