From SCADE to Lego Mindstorms
David J. White, Gerald Luettgen · 2004
The synchronous approach to designing safety critical real-time systems al-lows the notion of physical time to be replaced with an ordering among events. One such language of this type is Lustre which allows control to be expressed through dataflow equations. This language is used as the basis for an industry-leading tool called SCADE. SCADE provides a graphical environment for ex-pressing dataflow equations as well as the state based formalisms found in other synchronous languages such as Esterel. In addition, C code can be automati-cally generated from designs, and verification facilities exist for checking designs for both expected and unexpected behaviour. An implementation platform for SCADE designs would be a valuable tool to aid in the teaching of synchronous reactive systems. The implementation plat-form this project will assess is the Lego Mindstorms architecture, which com-bines the capabilities of Lego as a construction set with an embedded computer system called the RCX. When the RCX is used with the open source firmware