> We've got a set. We haven't done anything with NQC, so far. I figured
> my kids could handle "Gordon's Brick Programmer" a little better, since it's more
>visual.
>
> Of course, the programming tool that come with Mindstorms is severely limited. My
>10 year old figured that out in a few
> hours. He was in the process of "inventing" nested loops, only to find that the
>tool didn't allow it. It's too bad,
> because the tool was awfully easy for beginners to use.
> (It's worst flaw was the lack of variables. You can't do much decent with a light
>sensor if you don't have variables to
> make comparisons of different readings.)
well, the light sensor is designed to differentiate between light and dark
and isn't really meaent for anything more complicated, for instance, if
you want to follow the black line in the example they give you, you can
tell it to go right when it sees black and left when it sees white, and it
appears to follow the line, this is fairly simple with the brick
programmer, it's something like:
(where the left motor is connected to A and the right to C)
------<light sensor>
dark light
ON A ON C
OFF C OFF A
you also want to set the power for A and C to like 400 or something like
that so it doesn't go too fast, i forgot how it does that b/c it's been
about a week now :) in any case, it's just meant for simple stuff like
that..
> I have to admit that I haven't even thought about using Linux to program the Lego
>brick, so far...
NQC might be a bit much for your son, how old is he? I hate to mention
this product, because I'll be horribly abused on the list for it ;p but
there may be something for visual basic to program it, that would at least
introduce him to the idea of normal programming.. i know that writing
straight code (if oyu can call it that ;p) in VB is not much simpler in
general than in C, the concepts that you have to use in NQC like macros
and the importances of syntax can be a bit more challenging for a
beginner..
that said, there is probaly something similar for linux as far as
programming goes, but it's less likely to have a mindstorms extension :)
-Justin
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| Justin Ryan
| Developer Relations Associate
| TurboLinux - http://www.turbolinux.com/
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| WebMaster, PCHelp - http://computers.iwz.com
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