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Wow this is pretty cool. I have written some C (NXC, really [1]) programs for Mindstorms and it was super fun. I built a little rover-like car and wrote a pro
by minimax 14y ago
Wow this is pretty cool. I have written some C (NXC, really [1]) programs for Mindstorms and it was super fun. I built a little rover-like car and wrote a program that would make the car play with my cat in the living room. It didn't work very well, but the idea of writing programs where the output was moving an object in the physical world was novel and very pleasing. I encourage everyone here to give it a shot.
In order to test out a new program, I had to hook the brick up to my computer via USB, then copy the program over, then run it by pressing a series of buttons on the brick. Also there wasn't a good way to get debug logs in real-time (it's hard to read the screen when it's driving around the living room). Hopefully with Linux that process will get easier. The idea of SSHing into a Mindstorms brick, running a program, and watching the debugs logs on stdout is very exciting.
1. http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/ http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/
- drbawb 14y agoI haven't heard of NXC! It looks like NXC is basically NQC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Quite_C http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Quite_C) for the current-gen Mindstorms products? (I only got a chance to play with the new Mindstorms kit briefly in college to setup a small demo, they got about 25 educational kits as part of some grant. I just used the included software.) I got to do FIRST Lego League in grade school with the RCX 1.5 and later the RCX 2.0 AFAIK the rules prohibited us from using NQC at the time. I believe we were limited to RoboLab [a separate product sold by LabView] and the stock Mindstorms software. (*Which I should point out is _nothing_ like the current software. It was geared towards very young users, very "flashy", and quite buggy. -- It did, however, include lots of media and examples for the robots in the instruction manual.) That regulation was probably for the best, as my elementary self would've probably been frustrated by C-style syntax. I knew it existed only because our coach and assistant coach were both software engineers.
- colanderman 14y agoWhich I should point out is _nothing_ like the current software. It was geared towards very young users, very "flashy", and quite buggy. Actually, that's been my experience with the NXT-G language (the "current software") as well.
- cbhl 14y agoWhen I was using NXT in high school for the FIRST Tech Challenge, RobotC was a proprietary IDE with its own C-like language for NXT that had wireless (Bluetooth) download, debugging, and remote control (with support for common PC joypads). I honestly thought it made NXC look like a joke.
- mrshu 14y agoNXC also has most of these features today. Trouble is, that it still is kind of slow compared to RobotC.