LEGO Mindstorms NXT
anybody seen this yet? it looks great. i signed up as a developer, if i get in, i only have to pay 150 instead of 250, and i get it in june, instead of december or whatever. i remember on the old mindstorms sets people hacked them to accept other programming languages. i was wondering what you guys tink the hacking potential of this new one is. it has built in bluetooth, and ive bben wanting to make a fully wireless robot with a wireless video camera for some time now, and this might make it easier to do. i want to be able to control the wireless bot thru an internet server so hat i can drive it around from anywhere. do you think tis lego set would be able to be set up to do that? ive been having a hard time getting all the help i need for my wireless boebot without speding a fortuen. the wireless camera being the most expensive. gotta go, see ya guys later
Comments
The nice thing about the original RIS cube was that you had to download its firmware when you put the batteries in. Also, that it was based on the Hitachi H8 processor -- 16 bits, reasonable speed, reasonable memory space. Oh, and the firmware was multi-tasking out of the box.
It also had a very nice 'token' code -- which somebody made a 'NotQuiteC' (NQC) compiler for. This let you program it in a multi-tasking subset of 'C', using the 'native' token code.
Now, the Mindstorms programming environment was neat with its graphical program layout, but that did kind of limit you.
Oh, and the 'downloaded firmware' also meant that a native 'C' compiler, and even a Java compiler, were possible.
So, the big question for me is -- is the 'native' environment good enough, or easily hackable?
Other limitations -- 4 motors at the same time would have been so nice. The new brick still only supports 3 motors. Sigh.
Could be neat though.
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