My LEGO Mindstorm had been unused for
years now especially since I started using micro-controllers like
BasicStamp and now
Arduino. It had a short revival last winter when I
used it to build a
Star Wars R2-Unit crane for my twins. It was a
real success and they played with it for two weeks straight.
Initially I was happy that my RCX was
being used again but very puzzled that, after that playing stint,
they had not included this new motorized brick into their regular
LEGO play. Why? Maybe the cabling or specially the gears were a bit
much for their age (7).
Lately my son made yet another awesome
LEGO thingy and I told him he could make one part spin if he used the
motors. He suddenly looked defeated and told me that “the pump
thing is hard”. I finally knew why he was not using the RCX. He
thought that the pneumatic system we used when making
the crane, was
the only way to make a working machine. Happy to enlighten him, I
explained that he could use the motors alone and, at that very
moment, I saw that his little brain was about to explode with ideas
while he ran back to the LEGO boxes. His first creation was this 4
wheeled vehicle with one motor per wheel.
Then he dug up my old LEGO RCX 2.0
Mindstorm book that came with the kit, went through it one evening,
found a line-following robot and built it the next day. I heard the
perplexity in his voice when he called me saying “It's not
working!”. The robot, going in circle, was missing the right code.
I told him that building the physical robot was half the job and
that it needed a program to tell him what to do. Of course now he
wanted us to put the program in the robot.
I didn't want to disappoint him but the
last time I pushed code on an RCX brick was in 2001 with a Windows XP
computer. The software CD was probably lost in some storage box and,
adding to the problem, loading a program must be done using a LEGO
Infrared USB device (LEGO USB Tower) which are probably not supported
anymore. Or so I thought.
I recovered my LEGO USB Tower and,
ready for some major Internet archeology, Googled about LEGO RCX. I
quickly found that Not Quite C (
NQC) was still going strong. It was
the programming language I used 10 years before. Not only that but I
found that the LEGO USB Tower was now directly supported into Linux.
So I plugged it in and BAM! /dev/usb/legousbtower0. Minutes later I
uploaded a test program on the RCX brick and ran it. Victory is ours!
I coded a very simple program to show
my son some basic logic in programing and now he's completely shocked
by the fact that he can make a full robot, including the code.
I've created a monster and I like it.
More Geek info after the break
