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Lego Allowing Open-Source OS
JAZ writes "Forbes has an article on
on Lego Mindstorms and the independent Open Source (MPL) LegOS and how Lego is not trying to stop it (obviously Lego is NOT an American Corp=]) It seems that sharing Intellectual Property can actually help sales... who'da thunk it "
Since the article is pretty short on details, I thought I'd throw out some notes:
/. by Russ Nelson. :) Also very useful for debugging.
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
EmuLegOS. An emulator for LegOS. Gives you a yellow box on your screen, just as if you owned a Lego brick yourself
My HOWTO. More or less the official documentation. Enjoy.
Good luck- help Lego back into the black-
luge
IAAL,BIANLY
I just got myself a Mindstorms kit last week. There is no way in smurf I would have bought it had LegOS not been available. I own a Mac, and the silly software that comes with it won't run, not to mention how unprogrammable it is. Give me C++ over some graphical programming any day.
To Lego: You got a $200 sale to me precisely because you have allowed this to happen.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Eureka! The solution to NASA's budget problems:
Use Legos to build the International Space Station! It doesn't get more modular than Legos.
And even better, you're much less likely to step on one of the suckers in zero G.
Lego isn't making money off the Mindstorms programming language and interface. They'll selling the hardware (and just packaging everything necessary to access that hardware along with it). It's not as if Lego separates the two. An open-source Lego OS isn't going to hurt them at all. People will still need to buy Mindstorms to be able to use it. At least they recognize the fact that an open-source project might actually /make/ them money, unlike some /Japanese/ firms who won't let emulators out there hit the market.
It sounds like LEGO will be releasing a driver development kit that is more helpful to people working in alternate languages etc. From the FAQ:
Will LEGO MINDSTORMS release a Software Developer's Kit?
We have released a Software Developer's Kit (SDK), which includes a license to utilize the underlying
technology for the LEGO MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 1.0. The SDK has documentation to enable
advanced users to write commands to the RCX from alternative programming environments, such as Visual Basic.
This documentation provides much greater access to the full range of commands and functions built inside the
RCX.
The first release of the SDK focuses on communicating with the RCX from Windows applications, as the current
drivers are designed for this environment.
Steps are being taken now to revise the architecture of the drivers to be much more platform independent.
This will give users more options for leveraging the power of the RCX. Once the new drivers have been
developed and tested, we will release a revised and more powerful SDK. We expect the second SDK to be
released in 1999.
Use of the SDK and the underlying technology is strictly under the terms of the SDK licensing agreement and
is only for noncommercial use. The LEGO Group retains all rights to the product and the underlying
technology.