Eldora's first steps...kinda!

So I’m flat out at the moment working with the community around the launch events, but I had to take some time out today to try and get Eldora to take her first steps.

Why have I called my Lego Mindstorms Robot Eldora? Because it means “Golden One”, or “Gift of the sun”, anyway, you get the gist.

So I put together a very simple set of bricks to create the tracks and hooked them up to Eldora’s motors, setup the IR tower, loaded Visual Studio Express C#, compiled my code, and….nothing!

Turns out I needed to download and install the Lego Mindstorms SDK 2.0! Did that, then re-ran my very simple program which essentially tells Eldora’s motors (A and C) to power up to 8.

And WOOOO HOOOO! The lil’ girl went like the clappers, in fact, she went all the way to Steve Wrights office window and gave it a tap.

Incidentally, there was a link to the Lego Mindstorms SDK 2.5! If anyone knows what that is all about, and what the differences are between 2.0 and 2.5, please let me know.

Also, just to give you a quick idea of how powerful this stuff is, my code follows the map below:

• 1. Create class level variable of RCX object (controls the brick)
• 2. Get a hold of the Motor property of the brick
• 3. Set the Power property of the Motor to a value (I used 8, which was a fair bit of thump).

Awesome stuff. My next task is to see whether I can rope in the other input elements, such as the light sensor and the touch sensor into my program. And as you’d expect, they raise events within the code! Awesome!!!!!!