[Sugar-devel] TurtleBlocks driving lego NXT 2.0 -

[Emiliano Pastorino]

Hi, Martin et al,

We're working on a project to introduce robotics to school and high-school
kids this year.
For that, we're using both Arduino and Lego Mindstorms NXT2.0. There was a
pilot 2 months
ago using Mindstorms, but there wasn't any software support for the XO by
then, so kids used
only the brick interface to program the robots. We had arduino support in
TurtleArt, based on
Sayamindu's clone at
http://git.sugarlabs.org/~sayaminfu/turtleart/arduino-support , but hardware
wasn't ready so they used only nxt for the pilot.

Right now, we've a fully working version of TurtleArt with NXT support at
http://git.sugarlabs.org/~emiliano/turtleart/nxt-support
It supports all the sensors (touch, ultrasonic and color) and motors that
come in the box.
It uses nxt-python (http://code.google.com/p/nxt-python/) to communicate
with the brick, but only
via USB. I'm trying to add bluetooth support but I'm having a little trouble
making kernel modules work
on Dextrose.

You have to set a udev rule in order to make it work because of permissions.
Instructions are around
TurtleArt/tawindow.py:312 . It's just a line you have to add in
/etc/udev/rules.d/*

Next step is to integrate Arduino support, but first we've to test a new
module we bought to drive
more motors at the same time. All the Arduino hardware we use came from
sparkfun.com:
http://www.sparkfun.com/search/results?term=arduino&what=products
Also, we're using firmata (http://firmata.org/wiki/Main_Page) as Arduino's
firmware.

I'll try to upload a video tomorrow showing the functionalities of
nxt-support clone.

cheers,
Emiliano


On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 2:10 AM, Martin Langhoff
<martin.langhoff at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 7:23 PM, Martin Langhoff
> <martin.langhoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I would recommend as a place to start simply adding a set of blocks to
> >> control the motors and access the sensor data. And leave the programming
> >> logic to the Sugar Activity.
> >
> > Right - but I will need to write an exporter that spits out NXC, and
> > perhaps some glue commands that try to export it to the USB-connected
> > "Brick"...
>
> Well, as it happens, I just spotted Emiliano's new repository and
> commit. It looks exactly like what I was planning to do!
>
> The meat is at
>
> http://git.sugarlabs.org/turtleart/nxt-support/commit/69da7620d1d5ec0560f344c5b52859c9a534d8a6
>
> Emiliano, you're ahead of me! Tell us more about your project!
>
>
>
>
> m
> --
>  martin.langhoff at gmail.com
>  martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
>  - ask interesting questions
>  - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
>  - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff
>
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