Doug’s Pick of the Week

December 20th, 2006

Mindstorm Robots

How many of us are buying Lego MindStorms kits “for the kids to play with” this Christmas? If so, bring home your laptop for the holidays, fire-up Simulink (and a lot of code gen products) and control your Lego creations with this blockset. Your kids will be delighted, and you can even annoy the family cat with a food bowl guarding robot!

2:55 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | Permalink |

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3 Responses to “Mindstorm Robots”

1. Aravind Seshadri replied on December 20th, 2006 at 8:25 pm :
   

   Doug,

   As soon as I saw it I was really happy. I was hoping that finally I can buy NXT. I haven’t purchased it yet because I am using Linux and haven’t found any program which can substiute the existing program/interface provided by Lego.

   But apparently this requires a lot of other toolboxes which I cannot affort being a student (I guess RTW/RTW coder cannot be purchased by students.). I am also not sure if this can be implemented on the NXT right now. I guess the author mentions something about the ANSI C/C++ support missing for NXT.

   Am I wrong?

2. Takashi Chikamasa replied on December 20th, 2006 at 9:19 pm :
   

   Hi Aravind and Doug,

   >I am also not sure if this can be implemented on the NXT >right now. I guess the author mentions something about the >ANSI C/C++ support missing for NXT.
   Your suggetion is quite right. Currently, RTW-EC generated code can’t be embedded into the real NXT since NXT lacks ansi-C/C++ development environment. However, LEGO recently released NXT firmware source code as open source, thus please wait for somebody develops GCC based ansi-C/C++
   development environment for the NXT.

   I am really sorry that this demo requires a lot of tools,
   if you had them, you could simulate your robots on
   your designed bmp track in 3D. Desinging bmp track is pretty
   easy even for the kids!

   Takashi

3. Aravind Seshadri replied on December 21st, 2006 at 11:25 am :
   

   Takashi,

   Thank you for the clarification. I just found out that there is something called as NBC/NXC
   http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/

   But it lacks the user interface. Still looking for something which has a good user interface.

   I hope your blocksets are useful for other who have the required tool boxes.

   -aravind

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