How to use synchronous languages to play with the Lego Mindstorms ?

News

11/04/2007

It has been a while I posted here.

Google Analytics tells me you were 483 different people coming from 43 contries who take a look on this old pages on march 2007. I didn't expect that !

I didn't know this pages could be still useful. Maybe a lot of these peoples are just lost, searching something else ? I don't know.

One word about my students. Each year, they are still building robots and drive them using Esterel program. I didn't update anything. We use the same first Lego Mindstorms boxes, the same old Esterel v5.9x compiler and the same old Linux computers. Everything is still working fine and I don't want to update anything. 

Keep playing,

Martin

05/01/2004

A small update was made to add the pictures section and correct dead links and some minor errors.

Martin

03/02/2000

A new version of the Lustre tool is available and a lot of work was done on the Esterel tool to make a very good programming interface which now handle the light sensor.

Martin

Introduction

This site was made for people who are interested to try their synchronous language on the Lego Mindstorms.

If you know nothing about synchronous languages, please have a look on the links and Esterel examples to see how theses languages can help you writing Lego programs and more.

For the others, take a look on these pages and tell us if you made something interesting for the community. We'll be glad to put it here.

Have fun.

Christophe & Martin

What do you need ?

 
• A Lego Mindstorms Robotic Invention System box.
You can buy one at the Lego World Shop or from a local dealer.
• legOS
• an operating system for the Lego Mindstorms
• available here
• A cross-compiler for the Hitachi 8300
• available from the legOS page.
• Your synchronous language compiler.
• You can donwload the Esterel free compiler from here.

What to do ?

The first thing to do it's to choose the platform you want to use. We recommend a Linux machine. legOS is developed and test on this platform.

The first thing to install is the the cross-compiler. You need it to compile legOS. Go to legOS web page. Choose Files and download the cross-compiler (and legOS). If you have choose to work on a Linux machine, go to your file system root and untar the archive. It's the only thing to do on my Linux install (Redhat 6.0 and 6.1).

You can now install legOS. Take a close look on its README. It's very simple. If you have a Linux box, you only need to untar the archive. It contains the binaries for linux (Intel).  Modify a little bit de Makefile and you are ready to try the C examples delivered with legOS. See the Demo directory and the README.

We have only one thing to add to the README. Use the -s option width firmdl3. For us, it works only with. It tells to firmdl3 to download slowly !