Project: Programs to allow interactions between old Lego Control Interfaces (RCX, Lego Interface B, others?)

[Toastie]

@Bliss

WOW!!!

This is more than I and surely others were hoping for! With these additions, LEGO Blocky becomes the most powerful programming language for the Interface B running blistering fast - on modern machines - and platform independent! Crazy. I will be in Northern Germany the next week, but will have the interface B, an RCX with me for testing. I am pretty sure that everything will work perfectly well!

Sensing and turning outputs on/off in response is one thing. Having a full-blown, multitasking language in between is something totally different.

This is so unbelievably nice!!!

All the best
Thorsten 

EDIT: And there is "Yield" - so nice! This actually makes code look pretty. I have such a procedure on all my VB6 programs: Yield to other processes ... 

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Toastie

[Toastie]

OK, I did some more Blockly code testing, as it is right now (last version, @Bliss published).

If I understand this entire Interface B/LEGO Blockly combo correctly, we are experiencing the birth of a new power house for LEGO programming in real time. There is the I/O module and the brain.

The I/O module, Interface B, has 8(!) sensor inputs serving the original 9V LEGO Mindstorms sensors - and of course the entire suite of either third party or homebrew sensors of this system. And it features 8 9V PWM controlled outputs. 

The brain is a modern - and thus in every regard superfast computer, as compared to 1993, when Interface B was introduced. Code on the brain thus runs incredibly fast. 

The link between brain and interface is serial, with hardware supported sensor data encoding on the interface side (raw, touch, clicks, °C/°F, rotation count encoding), running at 9600 baud; which is - I believe - the "reaction time" bottleneck, but this is a fixed given.

As far as I am concerned, this is one of the most attractive LEGO vintage HW / modern SW combo I ever worked with.

Here is the thing: With a fast serial to parallel converter, speeding up the serial link to HW limits, whatever it is today, there is - again as far as I know - no reason not to use Interface A with LEGO Blockly. And that would be a killer application.

Interface A only knows outputs turned fully on/off, but I wonder if is possible, to do PWM as it is done in TC Logo: An interrupt service routine (=task in LEGO Blockly), called every 1 ms to update the 6 PWM outputs on Interface A/read the 2 inputs, and in between, operational code is executed on the computer. That would be another milestone for vintage LEGO HW control.

All the best,
Thorsten

[Bliss]

Lego Blockly Current version 2026-04-01-1836.

I did some automatic task naming and rename, delete etc managements etc...

 

If I find an Interface "A" 9750 one day, I'm sure I will enjoy very much to integrate this to blockly...
But I don't expect this to happen anytime soon.
We don't see this often on marketplace...  It's rare and expensive on bricklinks...