Subject:
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RE: RIS version 1.5 coming this fall
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Fri, 30 Jul 1999 02:51:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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1368 times
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Kekoa wrote:
> I personally do not expect to care one way or the other if they decide to
> do make the successor to the RCX impossible to crack - it certainly is
> their right to do so. Moreover, I do not expect to spend any more time
> reverse engineering another RCX-like device from Lego. Reverse engineering
> something like the RCX is only fun once. In some ways, RCX 1.0 is golden
> in my eyes, both because it is a reasonable platform to develop for (as far
> as RCX-like devices go) and because it is the only such product I expect to
> know so much about.
Well, let me put in my nickle's worth as a grizzled veteran of embedded systems.
I'm 37 years old and have hacked the following...
1. A Commodore PET (my first FORTH) at age 20 or so
2. An HP48 calculator. The PPC ROM and synthetic programming was probably
the prototype for a public user group providing firmware enhancements
3. Dark ages.....university, marriage, kids, etc
4. The RCX brick, which Kekoa laid the groundwork for and many others have followed.
While Kekoa may never undertake such a gargantuan task again, there will be
others consumed by the desire to know - just for fun...
The RCX was really opened up by having TLG provide hooks the interrupt vectors, and
with a pretty SOLID set of code in ROM and expansion possibilities in RAM.
A wouldn't be surprised to see 1.5 being really better firmware with more
variables, etc. They have a TON of money invested in the 1.0 hardware, and 80,000
units would barely break even...I'd be surprised to see a substantially different
hardware platform with more IOs.
I LIKE the 1.0 brick. Nuff said...
Cheers,
Ralph Hempel - P.Eng
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Check out pbFORTH for LEGO Mindstorms at:
<http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/lego/pbFORTH>
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Reply to: rhempel at bmts dot com
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Message has 2 Replies:
 | | Message from TLG!
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| Did anyone else get the message from TLG about a "learning day" at MIT? I'm just curious as to which group of people they sent it to - people with pages on www.mindstorms.com, or people who registered their RIS, or some other group? After nearly a (...) (25 years ago, 30-Jul-99, to lugnet.robotics)
| | | Re: RIS version 1.5 coming this fall
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| (...) I would be surprised, too. If I were doing RIS 1.5, I'd fix a few holes in the firmware (arrays and pointers, a subroutine return addr stack instead of one subroutine call per task, &c) and add some power to RCX Code without compromising its (...) (25 years ago, 30-Jul-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: RIS version 1.5 coming this fall
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| (...) Certainly they chose to allow firmware downloads to allow for future upgrades. For a new RCX, if they really wanted to prevent us from writing new firmware, the best solution, and one we could not defeat without extraordinary means, would be (...) (25 years ago, 30-Jul-99, to lugnet.robotics)
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