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 "

Comments

A few geek details (as well as URLs...)

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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-
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