Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Spring Semester, 2006
6.099: Introduction to EECS 1

Software

In this course, we'll be using the Python programming language together with a robot control and simulation environment called PyRo, which stands for Python Robotics. We'll also be using the GNU/Emacs text editor for writing and editing Python programs. GNU/Emacs is a powerful general-purpose editor, which contains some facilities aid in dealing with Python programs (such as automatic indentation and parenthesis balancing).

The course will have its own computers for you to work with in lab, that hook to the robots. These computers run the GNU/Linux operating system with the Fedora Core 4 distribution. In in order to do the homework, you'll need to have access to a machine (yours or someone else's) that has Python, PyRo and GNU/Emacs installed.

This page shows how to install the software on your machine. You can use GNU/Linux, Windows, or Mac OS. The installation instructions are different for the different operating systems.

There are a lot of steps to the software installation, so be sure to ask the staff for help if you have any questions at all.

Once you've installed the software, you can try a brief tour of the 6.099 software.