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.Net On Lego Mindstorm

Posted by timothy on from the send-miguel-a-set dept.

troop23 writes "A blog posting by Benjamin J. J. Voigt says this "The University of Potsdam has a project to develop a .NET VM for the Lego Mindstorms system. Lego Mindstorms just got a higher priority on my shopping list!" While the thought of using .Net to program Lego Mindstorms may not be palatable, having a mainstream dev environment sure is." Perhaps Mono would work just as well.

5 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Is Lego back on firm financial ground? by Phoenixhunter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Last I heard they had to axe some of their newer lines of products...they doing okay? I'd hate for my children to grow up in a world without Lego one day...

    1. Re:Is Lego back on firm financial ground? by Planesdragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Lego, like D&D or Disney, is a secure enough brand that even if its current owner went belly-up the brand itself would be bought, lock stock and barrel, and someone else would put out Legos.

      The only thing that could kill Lego would be someone competing with Lego and doing Lego better--in which case your kids would have leogos, just with a different name.

  2. Why? by cbrocious · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't get it. Why would they go with .NET rather than just writing a C/C++ compiler for it? We're talking about a low-speed embedded device here, a situation where the use of a VM is less than ideal. Is it just because they want to make the front page of slashdot, or is there a real reason?

    --
    Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
    1. Re: why? by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Or even better, use a more powerful microcontroller for your legos like a GameBoy. Programmable in C or C++, has Sound and a color LCD display, and with a 32-bit RISC CPU, you can do far more with this than the current Mindstorm microcontroller.

      Bluetooth modules are apparently also available for this device. Engadget has a description and a link to a cool video of this Gameboy/Lego interface in action

  3. Mindstorms Robot by andrewdk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Bah. My LEGO Mindstorms robot + Vision Command camera beats everything when I use Perl and PHP to allow people to drive it around my room from across the world. A link to this robot's interface would mean doom to my connection so I'm keeping it under covers ;)