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TCP/IP Enabled Lego Brick
An anonymous reader submits: "Yesterday, Olaf Christ announced that he has the world's first TCP/IP-enabled Lego brick that can be used as a web server. Imagine the possibilities of connecting your collection of Lego Mindstorms to the Internet! He has ported the extremely small uIP TCP/IP stack to the Lego Mindstorms platform. uIP has also been used to run a Commodore 64 as a web server, and is ported to the 8-bit Ataris and laptop keyboard microcontrollers."
This TCPIP stack has severe problems with overflow. I am working on limiting code to fix the problem. More info and a link to follow in a later post.
Do you want to remove linux?
Hope he's not using that thing as his webserver though...
;-)
Here's the text for those of you who reach a "server overload" message.
Subject:
true tcp/ip on the RCX
From:
"Olaf"
Olaf Christ
Newsgroups:
lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
Date:
Mon, 28 Jan 2002 20:16:29 GMT
View Raw
Message
I ve got the very first and only tcp/ip enabled RCX in my room, cool, eh ?
I will make a webpage at the end of the week to make the very first
(rudimentary, but working) version available to the public.
Right now, the tcp/ip stack is compiled into the kernel and the stack calls
the usercode itself.
The code to pass the incoming packets to the stack and to send packets to the
pc is currently running as a simple userprogram. (*.lx).
On the pc the lnpd runs a program that acts as a gateway between the tower
and the pc.
This gateway passes the packets coming from the tower to e.g. 192.168.0.1
and sends packets from 192.168.0.1 to the rcx.
Right now the only thing you can do is pinging the RCX.
But writing e.g. a very small webserver shouldnt be that big a deal
Because, lnp is still alive i had to disable the sound support to free some
RAM.
Right now i got approx. 3 KB RAM left, still enough to do a lot of useful
stuff.
I think, the best way to fully integrate the tcp/ip-stack into the
Legos-kernel would be replacing lnp by a tiny slip-driver.
On the pc we could get rid of the lnpd.
Olaf Christ
Subject: true tcp/ip on the RCX
;-)
From: "Olaf" Olaf Christ
Newsgroups: lugnet.robotics.rcx.legos
Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2002 20:16:29 GMT
I ve got the very first and only tcp/ip enabled
RCX in my room, cool, eh ?
I will make a webpage at the end of the week to
make the very first (rudimentary, but working)
version available to the public.
Right now, the tcp/ip stack is compiled into the kernel and the stack calls the usercode itself.
The code to pass the incoming packets to the stack
and to send packets to the pc is currently running as a simple userprogram. (*.lx).
On the pc the lnpd runs a program that acts as a gateway between the tower and the pc.
This gateway passes the packets coming from the tower to e.g. 192.168.0.1 and sends packets from 192.168.0.1 to the rcx.
Right now the only thing you can do is pinging the RCX.
But writing e.g. a very small webserver shouldnt be that big a deal
Because, lnp is still alive i had to disable the
sound support to free some RAM. Right now i got approx. 3 KB RAM left, still enough to do a lot of useful stuff. I think, the best way to fully integrate the tcp/ip-stack into the Legos-kernel would be replacing lnp by a tiny slip-driver. On the pc we could get rid of the lnpd.
Olaf Christ
http://arhuaco.org/
what about those people who have PC Case mods made out of lego's!
One great example would be to have a brick as a part of a security system. How about intergrating it with an X10 system? Turn your robot on with the flick of a wall switch.
It's already possible thanks to IR. Of course you need PC to read signals from RCX.
I believe the Inferno language by Lucent at Bell Labs has been around a year or so at least. There is a package to make the brick show up as a directory structure w/ pseudo files.
More info:
http://plan9.bell-labs.com
http://einstein.ssz.com/hangar18