Guide 0: Background
Introduction
Welcome, Roboteers. Welcome to the vast and exciting world of robotics. My name is Frank (Tha-An) Lin, and I would like to thank you for showing your support in NITRO. I greatly appreciate it. You are now members of the NITRO Tactical Programming Sector, which focuses on using programming to solve a variety of problems and challenges.
An introduction to LEGO Mindstorms
As you may know, LEGO is a very popular children�s toy. But did you know LEGO also makes things which many older people enjoy playing with? I believe LEGO brings out the inner �child� in all of us, and it is one of the ways to show that we never really grow up. If we remember what it is like to build and the fun we get when we play with the inventions we create, it will help us retain our youthful outlook on life far into the future.
Mindstorms Robotics Invention System is a set consisting of an overgrown yellow LEGO brick, called the RCX (Robotic Command eXplorer). This is the heart, brain and soul of all your LEGO robots. It has an IR transmitter/receiver, which can receive information from the IR tower connected to a computer. The brick has its own motor controller chips and a Hitachi H8 central processing unit (CPU) with 32KB of RAM.
Before you can use it, you need to load something called �firmware� onto the brick. It is basically 1600 lines of code that the RCX uses to run other programs. You can load it using the LEGO software, or BricxCC, which will be mentioned later. You can then program it using LEGO programs like RoboLab, or complier programs like BricxCC.
