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by Joey Gibson.
Original Post: Lego Mindstorms Are Very Cool
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I got some cash for Christmas, bought a Lego
Mindstorms robotics kit and It arrived yesterday via UPS truck. Ooo boy, this thing
is cool. So far I've built the starter robot (see the photos; click to
get larger view) and gone
through the tutorials. The RCX 'language' and the development
environment is very well done, if a bit too 4GL for my tastes. I will
say that this environment is going to be great for my
wonderful Thomas,
who is five years old, and terribly excited about the robot. To
program the robot you drag program blocks around that look like Lego
blocks and connect them together. You can do quite a bit without any
reading, which is good for a youngster.
For me, though, I want more.
So I've already installed a bunch of
stuff that should give me more. I've installed and played a bit with
NQC (Not Quite C) which
is a C-like language. I've installed two IDEs for NQC; one called NQCEdit, and the other
called Bricx
Command Center. Both are fairly nice if a bit crude. And of
course VIm groks NQC source code, so I can
always use it and the command line compiler. I've installed a Java API called RCXJava and Shashank
Date's API written in Ruby. (His powerpoint slides from
RubyConf2003 are available here.)
Needless to say, I'm set for a while now with stuff to do...
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