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Subject: 
Re: The rarest colour in LEGO - grey on a NXT?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.robotics.nxt
Date: 
Wed, 28 Feb 2007 23:41:40 GMT
Viewed: 
17197 times
  
In lugnet.robotics.nxt, Brian Davis wrote:
In lugnet.robotics.nxt, Jason J Railton wrote:

I can tell you that the foreground scenery does
lazily scroll past the logo, in parallax with
the background at a different speed.  But then
you'll have to take my word for it...

Until when? This is nice, but I'm curious now about the details. Which FW,
for instance? And when can the rest of us join you in the sandbox?

The firmware's available, as is Rasmus Pedersen's update to compile it under GCC
in Linux (or Cygwin on a PC):

http://nxtasy.org/2006/12/11/the-firmware-sources-have-been-released/

Along with a PDF document on building the toolchain:

http://nxtmote.sourceforge.net/

None of this is hidden - you can find it if you search for it.
I couldn't get this toolchain to work, so I'm using WinARM and the Programmer's
Notepad:

http://www.siwawi.arubi.uni-kl.de/avr_projects/arm_projects/#winarm

You need to open Programmer's Notepad, create a new project, add the Makefile
for the firmware and open that, then you can build the firmware from source.
However, you'll need to modify the Makefile slightly so it can find Rasmus'
'binsert' utility to assemble the final ROM image:

BINSERT = ../../utils/binsert

And you'll probably need to copy a 'cygwin1.dll' from a Cygwin installation into
the 'utils' directory to make 'binsert' work (unless you can re-compile that to
a stand-alone application).  Also, the 'ls' command in the Makefile won't work
under WinARM so needs to be removed.

If you're lucky you end up with a file called 'm_sched.bin' which you can rename
to 'm_sched.rfw' and the LEGO software can download it as firmware.

BUT - and this is a big but - it doesn't work.  There's a bug in this build of
the firmware that means you can't run even the regular NXT programs under it
yet.  All I've been doing is altering the way the graphics are displayed.

Rasmus has done a great job getting this to compile and run as much as it does,
but although it uses the source code from LEGO you don't get the same results
from the GCC compiler as you do from the expensive ARM compiler that LEGO (and
Dick Swan on RobotC) are using.

There are a few people working on this bug, and on getting a reliable toolchain
available for building the firmware.  If you want to get started seeing how you
can alter the firmware then go ahead, but no-one's in a position yet to offer a
stable and working version of either the standard firmware or a free toolchain
that is going to work properly yet.

On the other hand, if you can help with debugging the source then please get
started as soon as you can.

Jason R



Message has 1 Reply:
  Re: The rarest colour in LEGO - grey on a NXT?
 
(...) Thanks Jason (...) It is pretty close I think. I fixed some bugs. Now Demo.rxe and "Try Me" loads/runs but terminates early. Actually, it is really fun as one is forced to look inside and understand the LEGO virtual machine. Well, My latest (...) (17 years ago, 6-Mar-07, to lugnet.robotics.nxt)

Message is in Reply To:
  Re: The rarest colour in LEGO - grey on a NXT?
 
(...) Until when? This is nice, but I'm curious now about the details. Which FW, for instance? And when can the rest of us join you in the sandbox? (17 years ago, 28-Feb-07, to lugnet.robotics.nxt, FTX)

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