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I hear B.I.O. Bugs are quite hackable, and are based on work by roboticist Mark Tilden.

The SliMP3 is quite hackable, as the code's all in Perl (see the developer's list).

LEGO MindStorms are a perennial favorite, and are extremely hackable.

And let's not forget TiVo, which is a hacker's playground.

Finally, one of the new Compaq iPaqs can be hours of fun once you install Linux on it and begin having wireless fun with it.

The Lego Reverse Engineering Site.
-russ

The earlier discussion of the demise of lego mentioned the downward spiral of corpate estimates of customer intelligence. For example, I'm not saying that Lego LOGO was a powerful programming language, but it was certainly more powerful than point 'n click / Drag 'n drop programming mechanism associated with Mindstorms. To companies really beclieve their customers to be so inept that they can't candle even the simplest of [cough] complex tasks?

And in the spirit of Karma Whoring (in that I can't integrate it into my previous train of thought) check out Russ Nelson's excellant Lego MindStorms Website

--CTH

According to this "The RCX uses a 38kHz carrier, which is pretty typical for TV remotes. As for the sampling rate, the RCX runs at 2400 bps, which makes each bit approx 417us."
So maybe there isn't going to be a speed gain(except maybe from PC to the IR transmitter.. rather moot i'd think)

Legos were great toys back in the old days (early to mid 80s) because they were actually building blocks from which you could create anything. Now, however, the company has sunk into the abyss of movie tie-ins and thus created an unfortunate market segmentation effect which has reduced their appeal.

Back in the old days I had a Lego Technic (model 1000) composed of gears, belts, shafts, motors, and various joints that allowed you to create an almost infinate variety of engieering marvels. There was in fact a segment of a physics curriculum built around the use of Legos to simulate simple machines (levers, planes, screws, etc.) as well as an introductory programming and robotics curriculum (geared tward middle schoolers) around lego LOGO (before the days of Mindstorms).

Now when you buy a Lego Technic kit, it is intended to build one specific thing, and has detailed instructions for building that one item, rather than leaving it to the creativity of the child to build unique devices. The same is true of Mindstorms. While it's neat that the lego device is no longer wired to the computer, the mechanism for programming the Mindstorms devices is dumbed down for todays youth. Thanks to Russ Nelson, who, aside from doing great things for Open Source over the years, has a detailed site about the Lego Mindstorms Internals. It's a shame though that Lego didn't do this sort of thing themselves, and fight harder to avoid descending to the level of selling lego models of movie-related toys, rather than continuing ot target their core audience.

--CTH

Netscape 4 made the menu context change the top item, so if you tried to do the above over an image (even an invisible one, like one colored like the background) or frames, it wouldn't work--hence it was no longer gestural. (Which sucked. I downloaded the original mozilla source just to fix that for myself.)

It's possible to do more gestures using menus like this (so that it's not really separate gesture code), but gesturing a particular distance is harder than a particular direction.

Pie menus to the rescue! Pie menus open up around the cursor arranged in a circle. By making sure the directions to particular items are always fixed, it can be made gestural. (Not too different from Ken Perlin's alternate PDA input language, actually.)

Pie menus have been around for over ten years. There's pie menu widgets for windows and X, and even a piewm.

This is the oldest file on my web site.

-rw-r--r-- 1 nelson root 35867 Jul 31 1994 packet_driver.html

It doesn't use any Win32 APIs. It supports Beame & Whiteside TCP/IP. Runs over Crynwr packet drivers. And a wireless connection rocks. I was a LPB for a while, until Clarkson shut down my back-door wireless T-1 equivalent.
-russ

And now its happened. There was a time when people who used Linux came up against brick walls AND THEN CLIMBED OVER THEM. The Quickcam for example. Great device, but no Linux drivers. so they wrote them.

Unfortunately everyone sees Linux as this great, magical, free thing which popped up from nowhere and everyone can have it, plus they get to tell the people that gave them this free thing to bloody well hurry up and make it work for them, just so they can go off and tell their mates how crap Windows etc. is and look what I've got, and oh yeah I didn't pay a penny! Ha!

One free example of a mature non-toy QNX-like OS is Doug Comer's XINU. One big advantage XINU. has over QNX is that it is free. Another is that XINU is well documented in text books. Another advantage is that XINU has one of the best implementations of TCP/IP available (thoroughly documented in several text books). Another is that XINU works with the many dozens of Russ Nelson's GNU Crynwr packet drivers. If you are looking for something QNX-like but free, chose XINU.

Luckily, a lot of effort has gone into reverse engineering the Mindstorms Brick. Russell Nelson has a lot of good information at http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/

I have been working on a Java toolkit for programming the Brick, and for manipulating it interactively. My kit, called RCXComm, can establish serial connections with the RCX brick via the IR port, and can handle packet communications, upload programs, send messages to active RCX Programs, as well as a few other things. The RCXComm classes can be used as standalone software, but they are really intended for incorporation into other applications.

Java tools for playing with the RCX are available at: http://www.popbeads.org

If you use the kit, I would appreciate hearing any feedback you have.

Incidentally, Java classes for decoding CueCat scan data are also available at http://www.popbeads.org

I'm in total agreement here -- Lego Mindstorms is an ideal way to start a child with programming. The only drawback I can see is the expense.

The programming environment that comes with the system is a very simple GUI that runs under windoze. That programming environment is fairly limited, and your child will probably outgrow it fairly quickly. Once that happens, you can introduce him or her to the more advanced methods available to program the system, including Visual BASIC, pbForth and the various Gnu compilers under *NIX using legOS.

There's also a web page at http://www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics/ that has links to lots of other programming environments for Mindstorms.

Look here for a comprehensive list of available RCX tools.

As for aiming at the wrong market -- their attitude slowly changes. They start marketing for adults. Look here and here (front and back sides of their printed ad).

Moderate this down (-1, Minus One)
--

"... you should have used the Preview button".

4) Clarkson Packet Drivers (now Crynwr?)
5) Galahad!

"... you should have used the Preview button".

4) Clarkson Packet Drivers (now Crynwr?)
5) Galahad!

4) Clarkson Packet Drivers (now Crynwr?)
5)

4) Clarkson Packet Drivers (now Crynwr?)
5)

--

--

lugnet.com

www.crynwr.com/lego-robotics

Or, if you prefer a link: ftp://ftp.crynwr.com/pub/fsb.

Older stuff is under "archives", newer stuff is under "archive". It's just a raw message dump, navigation primitive.

Theo threatened to mailbomb me because I tried to respond personally to a Usenet posting of his. I was just so shocked that the leader of OpenBSD would be so childish.
-russ

Subscribe to one of the DNS-based blocking services. There's a listing of them at www.crynwr.com/spam/. That particular host isn't on the RBL, but they are on RRSS, and no doubt ORBS.
-russ

Since the article is pretty short on details, I thought I'd throw out some notes:

1) The Lego uses a Hitachi H8-300 chip, which is a target for gcc, so compiling code for the chip is merely a matter of rebuilding gcc as a cross-compiler.

2) Strictly speaking, LegOS is not an OS but a library, which you compile along with your actual code to give you OS-like features: threading, time management, etc. It also frees you from lego's arbitrary limit on variables (only 32! with no data structures! eww...) and other such problems.

Umm... that's all the geek info I can think of off the top of my head. URLs:
The Official LegOS homepage.
LUGNET, which is a discussion area for all types of lego stuff. the robotics list there serves as the main discussion area for LegOS development and use.
The Internals page. Already mentioned here on /. by Russ Nelson.
EmuLegOS. An emulator for LegOS. Gives you a yellow box on your screen, just as if you owned a Lego brick yourself :) Also very useful for debugging.
My HOWTO. More or less the official documentation. Enjoy.

Good luck- help Lego back into the black-
luge

Lego Mindstorms Reverse-Engineering. Go. Download. Be happy.
-russ

You can get gd1.3.tar.gz from me.
-russ

Just look at the pictures!
These are not the traits of a genius.

Where can I get one of these? I NEED one !

Seen here.

My whois information is in the public domain, and always will be.
-russ

The information on my page is still correct. Nothing made after the Quickcam 2 is supported (yet). Sorry. There are still QC2's available refurbished, and they work well with cqcam and other available drivers.

The latest news is that there is a QCVC/QCPro driver under development. It will be binary-only under NDA (unless Logitech changes their minds about that) and should be available RSN. I'm not doing the development, so I can't give a date. Watch the Quickcam Third Party Drivers mailing list or my Quickcam pages for announcements.

--Patrick

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