Mindstorms Programming.ppt

Mindstorms Programming Java + leJOS, NQC, and others Hardware and firmware The RCX is a Hitachi 8-bit microcontroller 16 Mhz clock rate 16Kb of ROM 32 kB of RAM Firmware includes basic executive User program (what’s left over) About 1/1000 of a bottom-line PC, but more computing power than the Lunar Lander. Communicating with the environment 3 input ports Various sensors: touch, light, rotation, temperature Read 10-bit values from environment 3 output ports Control actuators: motors, pneumatic valves, switches Sound Counters and interval timers Infrared communication port Download program, upload data to host The Firmware Built-in executive time-slices between activities (Threads, tasks) Interrupt handler for asynchronous events detected by sensors Sufficient to support synchronization primitives from high-level languages: Java, Ada95 Graphics programming interface for iconic programming NQC (not quite C) for C-like programming with threads Java and LejOS LejOS is a pared-down JVM that executes bytecodes on the RCX Download from lejos.sourceforge.net Round-Robin scheduling: 128 instructions / time slice Event model: asynchronous event handling described by means of listeners Exception handling for synchronous abnormal conditions Single-precision floating-point arithmetic No garbage collection: 12 kB for user programs Instant Java Imperative language, object-oriented, multithreaded Class is basic unit of encapsulation: Methods and data members Private / public attributes to control visibility New classes created by: Composition: data members are instances of other classes Inheritance: new class overrides and extends attributes of parent Classes grouped into packages to define API’s Package-class visibility described by import clauses A simple class to control the RCX import josx.platform.rcx.*; // leJOS API class dumb { private static final int MAX = 1500; public static void main (String [] args) { // r