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

[Jorge <xxopxe@...>]

This is the moment to mention this: Project Butiá.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyxbXH2HHgo

It's, amongst other stuff, a firmware running on a Arduino with a extra
board that allows to plug & play sensors and actuators. Connected stuff
is detected by the board and assigned an identifier and spoken to trough
a serial link.
All this is accessed trough a library, written in Lua for portability
and everything else. This library provides a socket server to manipulate
devices. It runs on a PC like the XO depicted, or a SBC like a wireless
router with a USB connector or a Beagle Board. This service is used by
language bindings (at this moment Python, TurtleArt and obviously Lua).
(In Uruguay there a OLPC like project covering all the public schools
with XO's, so there's a good deal of effort on XO specific stuff).
You can either just plug sensors and program directly on a high level
language to move the robot (like a NXT but better), or just use the
board and wire your own sensors and actuators and extend the firmware,
or anything in between.
It's intended for High School students, but is expected to expand up and
down the academic scale. Everything is under MIT license, and we expect
to document everything down to mechanical design. One design requirement
was a cost equivalent to a XO: about 200US$. The prototype is at 300US$,
so we're almost here :) 
It's not finished yet, but is "almost there".

Jorge

PS: project page http://www.fing.edu.uy/inco/proyectos/butia/