Sitemap
Print Version

Login

Email:
Password:

Last update:
June 13. 2009 11:36:00

Lego Robots

My little sister won a insanely cool set legos back in 1994, the precursor to the Lego Mindstorm. It had an 8-bit ISA card we put in our Tandy 1000(which is slower than the new Lego Bricks with an 8088@8mhz) and you programmed it in LOGO, but really it is suprisingly similar. The old set had capabilities to have more motors/lights, but it had the exact same set of sensors.

I got to play with one of the new sets when I took C++ at ETSU in 2003. They let me bring one home and play with it for a while. I knew there was a lot of home-made projects for these things but I was floored to see the quality of a most of them. NQC is pretty damn amazing, I highly recomend it.

ETSU though needed to use real C++ so they decided use an awful way of commanding the robots via infra-red, every command you send to the robot has a second or two of lag and if you have your robot turn around, you lose contact.

What should have been used(and hope will be in the future) is another great project, BrickOS, this is a REALLLY small os written to run on Lego Bricks. You use a GCC cross-compiler to write you programs for it. I was originally trying to put together a package that would make installing this compiler on ETSU XP machines easier when I found someone had beaten me to it at when Bricx's website was updated with a minimal install of BrickOS that works perfectly at ETSU(which is a locked down XP install). You just unzip it anywhere and add it's bin directories to your path, Then folow the instructions. The next step is to get someone to install Bricx on the machines so that you have a nice IDE to work in.

NQC - Extremely nice C-like language to program Lego Bricks
http://www.baumfamily.org/nqc/

MacNQC - Extremely nice IDE for NQC for Macintosh
http://homepage.mac.com/rbate/MacNQC/

BrickOS(formerly known as LegOS) - complete C++ compiler for Lego Bricks
http://brickos.sourceforge.net/

Bricx - IDE for Windows for all Lego Brick compilers including BrickOS
http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/

Powered By CMSimple.dk