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Subject: 
Re: Hardware Hack
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics
Date: 
Fri, 6 Jul 2001 13:14:05 GMT
Original-From: 
Roy Wood <roy@centricsystems*NoMoreSpam*.ca>
Viewed: 
423 times
  
Has anyone heard of (or is themselves responsible) for a successful
hardware hack of the Lego RCX brick?

I am talking of "building your own from scratch".

I'm sure that someone will mention the HandyBoard, which works well with
Lego sensors and motors (I believe).


Along the same line of thought though, I noticed at the Mindstorms
Internal site on crynwr that the RCX CPU supports the following:

Series H8/3297
Product name H8/3292
Part number HD6433292
ROM size 16K
RAM size 512
Speed 16MHz @ 5V
8-bit Timers 2
16-bit Timers 1
A/D Conversion 8 8-bit
I/O pins 43
Input only pins 8
Serial port 1
10mA outputs 10


It seems intriguing that there are 8 A/D converters and/or 8 input-only
pins, and we've got access to only 3 inputs.  Are the others just not
connected?  I could see a couple of them being used up for other
purposes, but I still suspect that there is untapped potential, should
anyone choose to do some serious hardware hacking.

Has anyone given any thought to surgery on the RCX to enable more inputs
and outputs?  Am I missing something?


-Roy


p.s. Hitachi's website seems to be not responding well this morning, so I
can't download the PDF specs for the CPU and start looking deeper myself.
Still, if anyone else has done some investigation, I'd love to hear
about it.



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: Hardware Hack
 
(...) The four buttons on the front panel and the IR data port probably make up the remaining 5 inputs. I guess you could consider wiring up at least two of the front panel buttons to sensors since they aren't used when the program is running - but (...) (23 years ago, 7-Jul-01, to lugnet.robotics)

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