Lego Mindstorm Bot-Kit Port?

Jay Casler jcasler at ibm.net
Mon Apr 24 15:01:54 UTC 2000


I have looked at this briefly and its not so simple.  The Smalltalk
parts are pretty straightforward, but they depend on Dolphins fully
developed com/xcontrol functionality.  There is a dll that comes with
the bot kit which is an xpart designed to be used by visual basic.  It
hides the details of the actual binary that gets sent to the bot, and
all of the details of operating the ir interface.  To get access to this

dll you would have to implement a com/x framework in squeak, undoubtably

with a primitive as well.  This is not a small job and would be M$
windows only stuff.

If you haven't looked at the internals of the Dolphin code its sort of
strange. The object that models the bot has methods that correspond to
the various commands you can use from VB (and their analogs in the
visual tool from Lego).  When these methods are sent they send the
"opcodes" used by the VB dll as Smalltalk messages which are caught by a

"does-not-understand" method in the bot object.  That method creates a
com control block in memory and passes it to the instance of an M$ com
"class" connected to the dll by Dolphins com framework.  In this way it
appears that you are programming in Smalltalk but the actual "messages"
are translated to bot-kit operations on the fly for immediate mode
execution by or storage on the bot itself.

Jay Casler

Rick Zaccone wrote:

> Has anyone ported the Bot-Kit from Dolphin Smalltalk to Squeak?
>
> <http://www.object-arts.com/Bower/Bot-Kit/Bot-Kit.htm>
>
> There has been some talk about this in the past, but I haven't seen
> anything recently.  Is anyone working on this?  Is anyone interested
> in working on this?  I would like to communicate with anyone who
> is interested in this.
>
> Rick Zaccone
> --
> zaccone at bucknell.edu





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