Brick Labs » nxt brick

What Programming Language do I use?

Eric — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 12:44:51 +0000

There are several available languages for programming the LEGO NXT MINDSTORMS brick. You can use C, Java, Lua, Assembly or one of the Graphical languages.

Steve Hassenplug has put together a pretty good list of the available languages, and some comparisons between them.

You can find the list here: NXT Programming Software

RobotC – Mini Tutorial #1 – Displaying Battery Power

Eric — Wed, 05 May 2010 02:25:43 +0000

Today, while trying to debug the Example 1 from the Experimenters kit, I thought I might be having battery issues. So I wanted to see what the battery level was.

Being new to RobotC, I figured this might be a fun little mini-project (and I do mean mini) to tackle.

So, first thing I did, was start checking the functions and such in RobotC. I found a neat value you can read.

nImmediateBatteryLevel

It returns an integer of the battery level. If your battery level was 7.499, then this value returns 7499.

So I copied a line of code to display this value on the NXT, like this below:

nxtDisplayTextLine(1, "%d", nImmediateBatteryLevel);

Perfect! But wasn’t quite satisfied. I wanted to display this on the NXT with the decimal. And a bit of text so I knew what the value was.

Well, with a bit of math, you can divide a integer by a factor of 10 to get a decimal. Since I wanted 3 decimal places, I divided by 1000. In order to do the division, you need to convert (or cast) the integer to a float. So that’s where the (float) code comes in. I also found you can include plain text in the nxtDisplayTextLine() function, and it will display that.

So here is what I came up with.

nxtDisplayTextLine(1, "Battery: %.3f", (float)nImmediateBatteryLevel / 1000);

That code puts the word "Battery: 7.499" on Line 1 of the NXT screen. The 7.499 is the actual battery value. The %.3f means I want a value with 3 decimal places, of type Float.

For those of you with a C background, this is common knowledge. For those with a Basic background, type conversions are usually automatically done for you. In RobotC, you have to be explicit about it.

Will the NXT run the .NET Micro Framework?

Eric — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:44:08 +0000

So far, I haven’t found anything to show that the .NET Micro Framework will work on the NXT brick. The processor on the NXT brick will support the Micro Framework, but it looks like there isn’t enough memory. If anyone has proof of this being done (or of it failing), please contact me.

I did find this post by Guy Ziv (from nxtasy.org):

he says (and I quote from Lugnet):

The .NET Micro Framework documentations
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/embedded/bb278106.aspx
says it requires at least 256K RAM and 512K Flash.

The NXT processor has 64K RAM and 256K Flash….

So, it looks like my fears are true. I was really looking forward to using .NET to program on the NXT. I’ll have to see what sort of controller I can find, and make some interface cables to use the NXT motors and sensors.