Greetings
Until the NXT time it is! If you picked up from the last post, you would have guessed that the NeXT post is going to something about Mindstorms NXT. And it is. In this post I am briefly going to talk about a technology which has united my two greatest passions: Programming and Robotics! Mindstorms, by Lego, is a Robotics Kit which one use to build and program fully or partially autonomous programmable robots (Robots including, but not limited to bipedal humanoids). Lego Mindstorms was released following a collaboration between Lego and MIT's Media Lab. The Lego Mindstorms started out as Mindstorms v1.0 and the latest version now is the Mindstorms NXT v2.0, a huge leap from its predecessors in terms of processing power by the Mindstorms Brick and availability of different kinds of sensors. Lego Mindstorms NXT is programmable through the NXT-G programming software(simple programs can be built on the Brick itself), which supports Visual Programming. I, however owning to my hacker nature, decided to go one step forward and installed the LeJOS firmware on my NXT. LeJOS allows the NXT to execute special byte-code from LeJOS specific java programs! This means that you can code all you NXT programs in leJOS Java(similar to Java ME), convert it to special byte-code with the help of LeJOS NXJ on your computer(similar to the java JDK) and transfer the byte-code to the NXT and execute it using the LeJOS Virtual Machine. As one can see, the ability to use such a powerful language greatly increases the possibilities of the Mindstorms NXT. Also LeJOS can be used to communicate(2 way data streams) with other Java programs, whether they reside in a computer, a smart phone or even another NXT! Using you cellphone to control your NXT or developing a Client-Server relationship between the NXT and the computer can be achieved through LeJOS. The methods of communication are BlueTooth and the USB specifications. LeJOS is the not the only custom firmware for the NXT; ROBOTC and BrickOS can be used to run c/c++ programs on the NXT. For now however, I will be sticking to LeJOS. I will soon be posting a page on how exactly to get LeJOS on your NXT, as well as many clever, innovate programs for LeJOS NXT. Until then, take a look at a list of useful sites that I have posted down below!
Never The End.
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**Some Useful Sites**
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The LeJOS API
The LeJOS PC API
Great NXT tutorials
A NXT LeJOS forum
