Toastie

Hi @BrickTronic, Here you go: and even closer: This document (PDF) may be a matching datasheet - it is from Toshiba, from 1999, it covers 8-bit microcontrollers, and it has an onboard LCD driver. But who knows, TLG is always making big secrets about their electronic chippies: https://brickshelf.com/gallery/ThorstenB/ThisAndThat/SCOUT/tmp86cm29u.txt (You need to rename the .txt extension to .pdf - Brickshelf does not like PDFs to be uploaded). Best regards, Thorsten

Gentlemen, congratulations to reaching a fantastic level! Although it certainly does not need any "prices" or "winners" - it may or does make a difference ;) What has to be said was already said when you rolled your idea, approach, challenges and finally "solution" or "end result". To me, the challenges and solutions were the most important things. With deep appreciation. Sincerely yours, Thorsten

It can be made with an Uno ... let me know what you need - I believe I have some Arduino routines here. Best, Thorsten

Ab-so-lu-te-ly stunning. Crazy - and so cool. I mean, making it technically "work" (signing up hubs, have a connection) is one thing and certainly the basis of all what you are doing. But getting this all to work - for me, incomprehensible. This must have been and surely still is so much work ... wonderful. Thank you very much for sharing - and particularly for the write-up. It was/is a pleasure to read and enjoy! All the best, Thorsten

Lill' update ... Regarding my new brand new IBM XT (5160, IBM color monitor, 2 x 5 1/4" Tandon DS DD floppy drives) - as said before, I really don't want to alter the front of the XT to an extent, that it does not match anymore with my memory ;) That means, that a GoTek case, somewhat compatible with a 3 1/2" floppy drive, should not show up at the "front" - it would ruin my memory :D So I made a fake ISA version of the GoTek with goes into one of the ISA slots. No electrical connections; just snug fit. The white plastic material mimicking the ISA connector is from a IKEA shelf system, the metal pieces are from a cut up expansion port slot cover ... The idea is that the GoTek can be fired up any time I want to use a 360k or 720k image downloaded from the net and then copied (in case of 360) to a 5 1/4" floppy. There is one more thing to solve: It is hard to operate the GoTek on the back. So ... some soldering and wiring to an attachable front OLED panel with some buttons is in the works - using LEGO bricks ... we'll see. Best, Thorsten

Hello Jo, now, if it is important to you, I can remove the LCD from a "broken" SCOUT and take a shot. You probably know this website as well: https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Mindstorms_RCX#Scout At least we learn it is a Motorola microcontroller with so-and-so much RAM/ROM. Just let me know. Best, Thorsten

As I am colorblind, sand red is just that. Not the point: I believe it is not the sandpaper, but the saw blade: You can use a razor sharp and oh so thin circular saw blade to do the cutting. Next step would be ... nothing - or use a really sharp knife. Nevertheless: I can surely see, why this needed to be done (could I identify sand red that is :D). And: I admire people who use what is at hand - and get it done! That is the most important thing to me. Really nice job!!! And you have your bricks nicely lined up! All the best, Thorsten

Yeah, this is true. But it could also be just a testing the waters type marketing stunt: This monstrosity (as almost every set now) is totally overpriced - and of course they know it. But one can try ... and now they may play the oh-my-goodness-I-am saving-$100-game, which mostly works, as $100 is a load of cheap coffees. Well, at least "some" at Starbucks. There seem to be folks out there that judge $100 off as a fortune, but still paying $400+ as it is what it is :D It's a wheel in perpetual motion ... Best, Thorsten

I'll jump in, when it comes as a free gift (OK, gifts are always free, accentuates my point though :D) with any $100 purchase. Best, Thorsten

Yes it did! And both are doing fine. The thing is that when starting at ground zero ("OK, I have a dead XT from 1985, so what do I do now?"), with no DS DD (and not HD) 5 1/4" floppies anywhere to be found in my personal universe, I began to look around. eBay was inspiring, but most of that stuff comes from the US: Item $40, delivery $60+ and so on. After replacing the main board with a clone from 1986 ($120, from the EU) the seller thankfully also made a 5 1/4" floppy boot disk for me. So I had 1 boot disk for DOS 3.3. Turned out it was only the 8088 CPU that died on the original main board ... And yes, I damaged that floppy (so I thought) as the XT refused to boot up after some time madly tinkering with all the hardware ... Many, many nightly "hours" later (YouTube, and most importantly here: https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/), I tried the floppy disc drive on my Win98/DOS6.2 laptop from back then, which did not freak out to format a 720k(!) 3 1/2" floppy - and the XT can handle such a drive when a corresponding floppy is inserted. Believe it or not, I found such a drive in the university "basement", well there were many ;) Next was making a boot disk ... as the 3 1/2" floppy drives were happily talking to the XT; format b: /s made a bootable 3 1/2" DOS3.3 floppy. However ... I don't like to change the front of the XT to accommodate a 3 1/2" floppy drive ... it looks - wrong. Well, then I found myriads of images of old software on the internet - and then discovered the "GoTek". Chinese made, dead cheap. Ultimately powerful microcontrollers on board, they make e.g. old CNC (and others, you name it) machines come alive again; all you need is an image (and they are out there), a USB thumb drive holding up-to 999 images, and replace the old floppy drive in that machine with the GoTek. It is amazing. My XT now boots off from the GoTek - and I can do that over and over again - even when booting, turning off the power does not do any harm. So what I currently do is: Get this XT up to full operation. Use the GoTek to do the hard work. And then revert to the 2 floppy drives - in the meantime, I purchased 10 blank 720k DS DD 5 1/4" floppies for 20 bucks. So it evolves. The latest was downloading the Landmark Diagnostic images and test the system as much as I can on a clone main board - which is mostly restricted to peripherals, as this software expects the original IBM ROM chips. And most importantly: All this is to control all my LEGO trains (RCX, RC, PF, PUp) from the XT, as I did with my Spectrum. Best, Thorsten

Here's the bottom view of the PCB - nothing much to see - other than corrosion :D Did the same thing as @dr_spock, but had enough non-corroded copper on the top side to solder connections there so that I could still use the metal strips (after heavy treatment) and thus batteries: Best, Thorsten

Any chance to know which one this is? Best Thorsten

For sure! Thank you for posting the lyrics - I am completely in love with the movie script (this movie is everything but a wartime movie, it uses the stupidity of war to simply plot something that is so bizarre - and at the same time "thinkable") - and never really read the lyrics of that movie music. All the best, Thorsten P.S.: I don't even feel to derail this thread with such posts - they go smoothly along ...

Thank you very much, but it all goes back to day one of making computers, I believe ;) Best, Thorsten

Well, well, well. It is not selling that extraordinarily ... seems that the HP fans don't dig non-functional trains either I go with one of my favorite movies here (Kelly's Heroes) - just replace "Oddball" with "Train Fans" and "Moriarty" with "TLG": Oddball : Why don't you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don't you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don't you say something righteous and hopeful for a change? Moriarty : Crap! Cheers Thorsten

Your proposal is to do this with current (PUp) hard- and software, or am I mistaken? Best, Thorsten

Programming gurus. They always start at ground zero :D Honestly, I believe this came from back in the days. And is also a logical approach: Bitwise, it saves you one bit, when you begin at 0 as a valid entry. Hardware wise, it also makes things easier, as zero is easily recognized by the chippies. Also, 4 entities, hubs, channels, whatever, can be unambiguously addressed using only 2 bits: 00, 01, 10, 11 in the dual system, corresponding to 0 ... 3 in the decimal system. When you want to start at 1 and want to address 4 "devices", you need 3 bits: 001, 010, 011, 100 - and 000 is simply wasted. And this is not good for saving money on the hardware front. However, some people not always playing in the programming game believe that 0 is nothing, but that is not true ;) To alleviate that "problem", folks in the marketing department tell folks in the software department to "fix this". So they do: The first device/whatever is "1" with address "0" - as the marketing folks also told the programming folks to make it as cheap as possible. Best, Thorsten

Wonderful - this is so nice. The scale, the painting - I am in love. This LEGO at its best, including putting your very skillful hands on the bricks!!! With regard to movies, I am bad, terrible but - seeing this tree - too big for the car - this matches my personal one (and forever) favorite Christmas movie: National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ... does it get any better than this? Fantastic MOC - thank you very much for sharing!!! All the best, and drive safely :D Thorsten

True - more than 20 years . It all began in 1998 when I was using QBASIC on my Toshiba Win98 laptop to operate my brand new RCX independently of the RIS1.0 software, which I found a bit strange, as I actually learned (FORTRAN) "programming" on a PDP10 at the University of Kiel/Germany. Actually, I found and still find hardware much more interesting. This has changed since SMD not only took over, but became so small that soldering with my iron became essentially impossible (for me). Solution: Stay with the old stuff. 1980 - 1990 is great. Adding here and there some current hardware as protocol translators ... All the best, Thorsten

In principle, they do; the Scout has only 396 bytes of usable RAM though - the RCX is a 6kB memory monster :D. There are other subtle differences, as one can't change the firmware on the Scout (as far as I know) - I guess because it has many built-in functions and procedures as well as hardware: the SCOUT features a light sensor and the third motor output is hardwired to an LED, which is modulated with TLGs visible light link protocol (VLL) motor commands for operating the motor on the MircoScout (bottom right). You can also let the MicroScout run some "scripts" which are also programmed using VLL. The Spybotics on the bottom left brick is again programmable using NQC - it speaks essentially the same language as the RCX and Scout, with lots of extra commands and functions for inter-brick communication, sound, light effects. The Spybots need the Spybot com cable (IR/VIS link) for programming - it resembles the tower for the RCX and Scout. The USB tower (center) does "not work" with Win64 OS - there is "no" available driver out there. It does work on Win32 machines. There is also a procedure for building the 64bit driver using National Instruments software, however, it was too much for me, as there seem to be also legal issues using this software for building the driver, but I don't really know. I gave up on that. The RS233 tower works nicely with a RS232-USB adapter, so that is OK, at least for me. Best wishes, Thorsten

That is tough. Maybe @MAB has an idea? Best, Thorsten

Then you should get one - they are very handy. Serial tower, make your RS232 cable or get an original (all that sells dead cheap on e.g. BL), plug into decent serial2USB adapter, install Bricxcc (on your Win 7/8/10/11 machine) and off you go. Make sure that the COM port of the serial2USB adapter is <9 otherwise, Bricxcc will not find it. Alternatively, you can use the SCOUT SDK files and then use TLCs ideas of running code (I don't like that much, but it is OK). Also, the SDK comes with nifty trouble shooting stuff. Let me know (PM or here) if I can be of any further help. I have all the original TLG software as well as Bricxcc running on my Win11 laptop. Very nice work on the SCOUT!!! It is a wonderful machine. I love it. These are sooo nice. I love the looks. I am making rather good progress on my IBM XT. After a rough start (apparently dead motherboard - sigh), and a VERY steep learning curve, I managed to have this beauty boot-up from a GoTek flashed with the newest FlashFloppy firmware. This GoTek thing behaves now as 720k Tandon 100 2a floppy drive (there are two in the XT) - the only difference is that it holds up to 999 720k disk images on a USB stick ... time goes by, so slowly. I need to do some cosmetic changes, and will then post here ... still working on a 1988 Seagate 30MByte RLL drive I found in the basement as well, but that one may be dead. Did a lube job with opened lid (so lost warranty :D - too bad) to inspect and manually move the head assembly. It came back to some life (i.e. looking desperately for boot files, but without success) but remains silent after a while. We'll see :D All the best, Thorsten

Wonderful read! OK, you may stop here, but you can continue as you see fit, no restrictions (and I would very much appreciate that because I love "vintage" computing - to make it work with "vintage" and current LEGO; although the LEGO bit is not that big of an issue :D) I am wildly into restoring an IBM XT from 1985 I found in the basement of our department; nobody wanted it and everybody is asking "why on earth are you doing this". Well, even asking that tells me: Just reply "For fun" and take the "aha" reply as reason to change to something else. What very, very (very) rarely happens is, that an >old< individual replies: WHAT??? (And then all hell breaks loose :D) All the best, Thorsten BTW: IBM back then made a "carrying case" with exactly that stuff in it (OK, it is in bloody German)

Then do it! Your model deserves it. Really impressive. Or better: Unbelievable to me, how you do all your models. Thank you for this one - and all your other wonderful contributions in TrainTech! Best wishes, Thorsten

Merde - I missed this!!! How nice is that build - wonderful. My younger daughter (OK, she is young, 25 years old) comes every Halloween season over to our house and carves some pumpkins. Now, this LEGO rendition is really touching - from every angle. Thank you so much for sharing! All the best, Thorsten