Hey Reader,
The last few posts have been a bit self-serious. “Ruby, Lego™ and other things I dig”? Scrum? Process? Yeah.. I care about those things.. but dig? Maybe.
I want to talk about a much more important issue – one that will affect the grandchildren. I’m talking about the gradual disappearance of old-school Lego Mindstorms resources on the intramaweb.
I don’t have an NXT.. I’d love to have one but as she-who-controls-the-finances says “They are too expensive.. and you’re a grown up!”. Yeah right.. let’s see you say that the next time I buy you some Batman Lego m’lady.. “Oh you shouldn’t have.. take it back to the shop.” I don’t think so.
Anyway, I make do.. and enjoy making do.. with old Lego Mindstorm RCXs, Spybotics and the like. To me it’s what embedded programming is all about: the fun of working with limited resources and still getting stuff done. And there’s always stuff to learn. Lately it’s been getting the Spybotics and Microscout talking via the VLL protocol. I didn’t even now this existed until the kids started badgering me about getting all the programmable bricks talking to each other.
Over the years I’ve built up a list of online resources for the RCX and but am now seeing things start to die away – links no longer work, or pages haven’t been updated for a while. Even old NQC hasn’t had much love lately, all the energy going over the ‘NXC’ port to the Mindstorms NXT. It’s all fair and reasonable – there’s not much action in Commodore-64 land either as technologies that come and go.. well.. come and go. But I love my little RCX and I want to keep on loving it.. even if I am a ‘grown up’.
If anyone out there has old Mindstorms resources they don’t want to host any more – or know of stuff that needs to be preserved – let me know. I’m keen to keep as much of this stuff alive as I can. And if anyone has an old Cybermaster they’re looking to move on.. you know where to find me :)
It looks like NQC hasn’t been built for Mac OS X for a while – the current OS X binary is a couple of revisions past the most recent source. Probably just a GCC 4.0 issue I’m guessing.. well, there’s a weekend project if I ever saw one. When it’s working I’ll post the .dmg up here.
Cheers folks
Good initiative. It’d be excellent if we (as in the community, possibly meaning you ;-) ) could gather up all the useful resources out there (with the permission of the creators if possible, I s’pose) and have it all in one place. If nothing else, that’d make it far easier to make backups of it all.
This would be fantastic. Backups are a must too.
I shall try to gather some good links. It’s a shame that so much stuff is out of date though.