Re: Lua, Robotics, and a 13 year old...

[Mike McGonagle <mjmogo@...>]

He does have the Mindstorm stuff, and he likes it very much. We have
put together a couple of different projects so far. I am just trying
to encourage him to explore other areas of what it requires to put
together a robot from scratch. Not that I expect him to know
everything about everything, just give him a taste of what it is like
to deal with different aspects.

My background is more in programming computers, and putting together
various basic computer systems. While I have not deal with anything
robotic (other than the Mindstorm stuff with him), and I very
interested in building various computer interfaces using Arduino...
(Anyone know of a Lua and Arduino project?)

I just am interested in encouraging him to explore. Thanks for the help.

Mike

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 1:43 PM, Erik Hougaard <erik@hougaard.com> wrote:
>  On 25-07-2010 18:30, Mike McGonagle wrote
>>
>> A friend of mine has a 13 year old kid who is interested in Robots. I
>> am wanting to suggest that he learn a programming language (Lua in
>> particular) and learn a bit about building a computer (as Robots are
>> specialized computers). As Lua appears to be a language designed for
>> embedded systems, I was wondering if anyone out there could give me
>> some links to sites that deal with Robotic projects that are using
>> Lua, so that I could pass them along to the kid to encourage him to
>> learn Lua. Also, as a related topic, if there are any projects that
>> are dealing with AI, that would be great, too. That would be something
>> else for him down the road.
>
> I have competed with Lua based robots for the last 11 years in the danish
> Robocup Competition with different incarnations of the robot "Crazy Ivan".
> We have used Lua for all high level logic in the robot. Lua is a great
> language for robot logics, but with many pitfalls.
>
> I would recommend the Lego Mindstorm road - and lets the kid develops his
> own path from that, some like the software side, some like the hardware side
> but in both cases the Mindstorm kits are a great platform to start on. And
> let him start with the standard mindstorm software and he hit the
> limitations of that, enter Lua :) But the standard software is a good primer
> for robotics - lua is not :)
>
> /Erik
>
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