Actually those Robots are very tempting even for adults. It is
just that my wife does not allow me to buy. :(

My brother also almost bought it back when he was a Mechanical
engineer. Now he is developing sound card software for Creative
and Robotics is out of his interests.

By the way, Daniel (the OP) is a Junior College student (similar to
high school in the States). He is very bright young man and
he wrote the first dsPIC bootloader last year based on Tiny 
Bootloader 18F which was released to the public recently.

The URL for the download link is as following.
http://www.beaglerobotics.com/community
 

Regards,
Xiaofan

-----Original Message-----
From: olin_piclist@embedinc.com [mailto:olin_piclist@embedinc.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:33 PM
To: Microcontroller discussion list - Public.
Subject: Re: [EE] Hitach uC

Mike Hord wrote:
> Doesn't the Lego Mindstorms controller use a Hitachi chip?

Yes it does, but Lego doesn't let you at it directly with their software.
There are probably Mindstorm inthusiasts out there that have web pages
explaining how to get at it though.

Mindstorm is really intended for kids to learn, and it does a great job of
it.  For three years we sponsored a First Lego League robotics team.  Seeing
the robot do stuff made the kids willing to sit down and learn how to
program it.  At first we used the RoboLab software, which is based on
LabView.  It got the kids going the first year.  The last two years I made
them learn Mindscript, which is a text based language.  There was some
kicking and screaming at first, but once they got past the hump they
preferred Mindscript over RoboLab.

In the first year we won the first place performance award at the Rhode
Island state tournament and the second your the software award at the
Massachusetts state tournament.  The third year we won the first place
performance award at the New Hampshire state tournament out of over 100
teams that entered the NH system.
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