[Squeakland] Lego Mindstorms and Squeak

[Ned Konz]

On Thursday 24 March 2005 5:48 am, Mark Kesling wrote:
> We are having great success using Squeak as a four week introduction to
> the use of Lego Mindstorms with our 4th graders. It seems that Squeak
> allows children to construct simpler models and learn the concepts
> required for creating the logic necessary when using the Legos. We have
> worked with Legos for years but found that the introduction through
> Squeak, especially The Great Car Race, has moved the process of
> understanding way ahead of our past group experiences.
>
> Has anyone else been working with Legos and Squeak?

This is probably not an answer to your question (that is, if you're asking 
about *educators* who have been using these things), but:

There have been several people who have actually integrated the older 
Mindstorms units with Squeak.

Being able to do Etoy programming that controls the motors and runs the 
sensors is 

It looks like both Alexandre Bergel and John Purcell 
(jpurcell at alum.bucknell.edu) have made a package that will work with (older) 
Mindstorms units that connect using a serial port.

http://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~lego/
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/2412
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/1872

I made a simple Etoy interface using Alexandre Bergel's work (as I recall), 
but it was only a very simple one that only controlled the three motors (no 
sensor input).

What would be required to make this work with more modern Mindstorms units 
would be to interface to the Lego Mindstorms SDK 2.0 . As far as I know, no 
one has yet done this.

http://mindstorms.lego.com/sdk2/?domainredir=www.legomindstorms.com

Unfortunately, Lego hasn't bothered to support anything but Windows machines. 
Worse, they say that their RIS 2.0 isn't compatible with Windows 2000 (though 
this may have changed). So I'm never going to bother doing anything with it, 
since I don't have Windows XP on my main machine.

> Will LEGO MindStorms Robotics Invention System 2.0 work with Windows 2000, 
Windows NT, Windows 95, Macintosh, Unix or Linux operating systems?
> 
> LEGO MindStorms Robotics Invention System 2.0 has been tested and is 
supported on both the Windows 98 and Window Millennium platforms. LEGO has 
not developed LEGO MindStorms Robotics Invention System 2.0 for Windows 2000, 
Windows NT, Windows 95, Macintosh, Unix or Linux and therefore we are not 
able to provide technical support for these platforms.
> 
> While we realize this is not an ideal solution for other operating system 
users, we are very excited about this new product and will keep you posted 
through our web site with any news regarding development for the other 
computing platforms
> 
> Will LEGO MindStorms Robotics Invention System 2.0 work with Windows new 
operating systems Windows XP?
> 
> Yes. There is now an RIS 2.0 XP Patch available for download. Click here for 
the link to zipped file and installation instructions.

However, it looks as if there may be open source support (at least under 
Linux) for the Lego USB tower:

http://legousb.sourceforge.net/legousbtower/index.shtml

And there is a cross-platform Java library that supports all the versions 
under multiple platforms. It's possible that using this to make an external 
program that Squeak could communicate with would be the easiest way to get 
cross-platform support going. Know any Java programmers who could make a 
program using this?

http://www.escape.com/~dario/java/rcx/

Andreas Hosbach (hosbach at student.unibe.ch) at University of Berne has 
apparently also done some work with Squeak and Legos, but again only supports 
the serial port (and didn't do any Etoys work):

http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~hosbach/PecosRcx.html 
http://scgwiki.iam.unibe.ch:8080/SCG/560

-- 
Ned Konz
http://bike-nomad.com