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USENIX Technical Program - Abstract - USENIX Annual
Conference, Freenix Session - June 2000
An Operating System in Java for the Lego Mindstorms RCX
Microcontroller
Pekka Nikander, Helsinki University of Technology
Abstract
The Lego Mindstorms is a Lego bricks based robotics toy series produced
by the Lego Group, based on the ideas developed at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in the Programmable Brick project. The heart of
a Lego robot, the RCX microcontroller, hosts a Hitachi H8
microcontroller with 28 kilobytes of memory available for downloadable
firmware and applications. In addition to the GUI based programming
environment provided by Lego, a number of alternative programming
environments have been developed for the RCX. However, these alternative
programming environments are written in C, tightly bound to the
hardware, and provide only relatively low level services. The strong
hardware dependency makes it hard to debug programs; in practice, a
hardware simulator is needed, and such a simulator does not yet exist in
an open source form.
In this paper we present a new type of operating system and new
programming environments for the Lego RCX brick. The operating system is
written almost completely in Java, and currently provides runtime
support for Java, C and C++ programs. In the case of Java applications,
simulation and debugging is relatively simple as it can be performed on
a standard Java Virtual Machine with just a small hardware simulation
package.
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