Re: New pbLua Beta13o - Lua for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT

["Mike Panetta" <panetta.mike@...>]

CNC and general robotics.  The local roboics club here uses NXT
for some things I think, but there are a bunch of people that like to
do everything themselves, and maybe the club would be interested in a
LUA based controller.

I'm currently building a CNC (ish) single/dual axis controller board
based on a Luminary Micro Stellaris MPU and LUA would be fun to run on
that I would think.  Doubt I could fit LUA and a CANOpen library
on it tho, its only got 256K Flash as well.

Good news that very few modifications were made to the LUA
source.  I was actually thinking that the main issue would be
interface libraries (pretty easy) and some sort of console and program
storage interface (more difficult).  I was thinking a ramtron FRAM
device might work for storage, I don't know.

Mike

On 9/12/07, Ralph Hempel <rhempel@hempeldesigngroup.com> wrote:

Mike Panetta wrote:
> Do you have the source available?  This is exactly the kind of thing I have
> been thinking about doing for small ARM7 and Cortex-M3 based systems and I
> would love to at least see how you did the port. :)

I think I have the source somewhere :-) Actually, this is the topic of
one of the gems in the upcoming Lua Gems book.

I did not have to touch one line of source in Lua - only the luaconf.h
file had some minor tweaks.

I _did_ have to cobble together an embedded run time library that
was suitable for a small micro.

The NXT has an ARM7 with 256K of FLASH and 64K of RAM. The Lua
core, with interpreter/compiler, takes about 100K in Thumb mode.

The tricky part is interfacing with a console (I used USB ).

Do you mind if I ask what the application is?

Ralph