I'm glad to see there's a sub-forum for the Mindstorms product. It'd be great to hear comments from the LabVIEW community regarding the programming environment/language that ships with the Mindstorms NXT kit. The folks who post here don't seem to hold any punches, so I'm sure they'll pop up and I look forward to reading them (so long as they're positive .

J

Jason,

I don't have the Legos or the Mindstorms NXT toolkit yet, but I hope to get it in September. I'm sure you'll get my feedback, because I'm really interested in this technology and I'm used to say what I think.

Are you the one who created the toolkit? The most fascinating part of it is the circumstance that a program, written with LabVIEW is running on an Atmel microprocessor. Maybe there is an Atmel (AVR?) Module in nearer future? Be sure, I'd buy more than I can ever use . I have a bunch of ideas in my head what could be accomplished with "NI AVR Modules", but I don't know where or with whom to discuss them...


cheers,
CB

No, I did not work on the toolkit. That was/is being done by an intern named Chris Koci and Brady Duggan who was instrumental in the development of the Mindstorms NXT software as well. I personally worked on the editing environment/desktop software application that ships with the Mindstorms NXT kit.



I wasn't actively involved in the development of the firmware, VM, or any of that mechanism, so I really can't speak much about it. I doubt that much of the work we did is generalized enough for a generic module for that specific processor. It certainly showed that we can build a VM to run on such a chip and compile to an intermediate language that it can interpret. The implications of this as far as NI's product lineup, I really can't say. I'm not involved in that aspect of things.

J