Operating Systems and Middleware Group at HPI

Lego.NET

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Categories: Miscellaneous

Latest version: 1.4
Added 2004-11-17

Project to make the .NET run-time available on the Lego Mindstorms platform.
As the original Lego firmware is too limited for such a project, Lego.NET is built on top of alternative operating systems; currently, the focus is on brickOS.
Two different strategies are followed:
- One is to develop a tiny interpreter (code-named Micro .NET) which interprets .NET intermediate language instructions on the Mindstorms' microprocessor.
- The other approach is to develop a GCC front-end which translates Microsoft/ECMA intermediate language into native machine code of the target processor (the Renesas H8/300 processor in the case of the Mindstorms).
In either case, supporting the full .NET framework library is clearly not possible within the 32k RAM that the RCX bricks offer. Therefore, the features available to .NET developers on the Mindstorms platform are a subset which can be supported within the limited hardware resources. On the other hand, the system also offers some unique features which have no equivalent on the PC version of .NET. These features are exposed to .NET programmers by providing a wrapper around the brickOS APIs, given .NET applications access to the device's sensors and actuators.

Built for .NET

Free or free version available

Source code provided

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