Today I bought a new toy. Those of you that know me well will not be suprised to know it was some Lego. For those that don’t know me well, I’m desperately trying to hang on to my childhood. At 24, that’s a bit of a worry ;)

But the good news is, I can justify my interest in these (children’s) toys through both my education and employment. This Lego can be programmed. Programming is good. It is fun, and it gives me money (to buy things like Lego).

It’s part of Lego’s Spybotics range, which consists of four models. The premise is that the owner of the Lego is a secret agent, and they are to use the model to complete secret missions. These missions are uploaded via a customized communications cable, which connects to a COM port on your computer (it’s a good thing I have the docking station for my ThinkPad).

It took me about 2 hours to build the robot. I found it unusual working from ‘digital’ instructions (there was no familiar paper instuctions, instead I had to work off the electronic version, which was made using Macromedia’s Shockwave).

With the green-machine built and ready for action, I connected the optical communications cable to the ‘brain brick’ on the car, and uploaded a test program to the car. The car has an arc of lights on the roof, and a yellow light behind them. They are used to indicated messages back to the driver (like mission progress, or in this case, direction and distance). The brain block has several sensors on it, including two light sensors (this is how the cable uploads programs to the brick), a touch sensor at the front (for detecting impact, and backing up), and several IR sensors that can be used to triangulate the location and distance from the CPU to the remote controller. This is well cool. With the test application, the closer I got to the car, the faster the yellow light would flash on the roof. Also, my direction was indicated with the arc of lights - it would light up the two LEDs that were closest to me, meaning that walking around the car would cause the arc to systematically light up. Very cool again.

That’s all I’ve had time to play with it, but it looks like others have hacked the onboard processor and managed to get it doing other cool things, like following a track made of coloured tape (using the light sensors). I’m also interested in the Not Quite C language (and compiler), which will hopefully open up some other avenues for hack potential.