6 August 2006
New Mindstorm
The new Mindstorm is out! And there's also a book for developing Mindstorm robots with Java by Brian Bagnall. Wikipedia has a brief but useful entry with lists of supported languages and links to relevant source material.
I'm assuming that languages developed for first generation Mindstorm (RCX) will not work for NXT. Brian Bagnall is one of the contributors to the LeJOS VM (used to control a robot that visited the ISS in 2001!) and wrote the Core Java book on programming the RCX, but LeJOS's SourceForge page hasn't been updated since January.
The built-in language is LabVIEW, a visual programming language with lots of drag-and-drop fun (this is a toy, after all). In November 2004, I had looked at a very high-level visual programming language called Alice that is intended to teach programming through narrative. The demos were amazing. LabVIEW appears to be a little more gritty but still very kid-friendly. All the same, I'd stick with Java.
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