LRBJOP: A Lego Robot Controller PCB for the Java Optimized Processor
Alexander Dejaco, Peter Hilber · 2007
Lego Mindstorms is a robotics invention system of the Lego Group. It was intended for children, but turned out to be a great toy for adults, too. It combines electric components like sensors and actuators with Lego bricks and Lego Technic parts, such as gears, wheels and axles, to build robots and other automated or interactive systems. The Lego invention systems have a powerful infrastructure which makes it easy to construct various kinds of mechanical and electric systems, like robots. However, Lego Mindstorms originally had very limited program ca-pabilities (e.g. no usage of variables, expressions and function calls in the RCX code). Therefore, a more powerful processor was desirable. In this project, we use Lego Mindstorms sensors and actors, but build our own Printed Circuit Board to use the Java Optimized Processor (JOP) [Sch05b] as a central processing unit instead of the Lego RCX. The result is a PCB which provides everything needed to control robots with JOP, and has some