Chris Anderson from Wired Mag gives a great article covering some issues concerning Programming environment of Lego Mindstorms robots using different programming languages.
For anyone who’s ever programmed, there’s nothing better for understanding programming logic than properly tabbed and commented code, all in a column of text as God intended. And for your kids, there’s no time like the present to introduce real programming, using coding conventions that will be as relevant in the decades to come as they were in decades past.
Simple and straight advantage of RobotC platform - coding in plain C, with well written Documentation on each function used for NXT’s. For the last month, RobotC upgraded from v1.05 to 1.10, so there are some improvements and updates from Carnegie Mellon University developers.
A great news is that for our projects on Robotics and Automation subject, we have switched from Microsoft Robotics Studio to RobotC due to some reasons:
- Lack of documentation on MRS (Professional MRS from Wrox will be published at the end of the year)
- Missing some simulation sensors’ files for NXT (can’t test all the capacities of sensors without robot)
- Not all of students run Windows (but it can be managed via Wine)
- Full access to encoders and sensors data in simple programming manner.
As more sensors are about to come in stock, I believe NXT will become one of the easiest ways of implementing Robotics concepts and algorithms for students.