LATE BREAKING NEWS!

February 03, 2010 - A new version of pbLua - Beta 18i is available for download

Of course, my hopes for 1.0.0 are put off. Thanks to new pbLua user Stephen Day, a new bug was found in that pesky Bluetooth code. Fortunately he took the time to email a problem description and a great test case that exhibited the problem. It still took me a couple of weeks to fix it but the result is an even more stable console subsystem.

An upgrade to the latest and greatest is recommended.

December 20, 2009 - A new version of pbLua - Beta 18h is available for download

Hopefully, this is the final Beta release before 1.0.0. An upgrade to current firmware is recommended as there are many subtle fixes that allow much better control of the underlying hardware.

Thanks in particular to a particular user (just Google "askr pblua") who has worked some minor miracles for the NXT and custom sensors using pbLua as his main development environment.

Here's a summary of the changes:

InputSetType() now allows both type and mode settings.
The sensor type and mode now conforms closely with the values in the LEGO firmware. The new color sensor from the NXT 2.0 set is supported as well. See the Input Port API for details of the changes.
InputGetStatus() now returns processed results
The processed result is now an additional return value. It's useful when the default percent full scale or color values should be handled by the LEGO firmware.
InputSetValue() is a new function
Useful to reset the value of touch sensors and counters
require() is a new function
Useful for loading up only the parts of pbLua libraries that you actually need. It's not part of the NXT API, but you can read about it in this tutorial
DisableNXT() is a new function
Useful for stopping the underlying 1 msec timer ISR handler when you're messing around with things like sync motor settings.
Console automatically flushes characters
Previous versions of pbLua exhibited "stuck" characters in the BlueTooth console mode under certain conditions that required a return to the main parser loop to flush characters. This is now fixed.
Reading from the console works again
Previous versions of pbLua crashed when using nxt.FileRead(0,"?a") to read a character from the console. This is now fixed.