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emulegOS

What emulegOS is

emulegOS is a legOS emulator. We assume that you know:

1. what the RCX is (if you don't, follow this link to the Lego® Mindstorm page to know more);
2. what legOS is (if you don't, look at the legOS home page)

We started this project because we like a lot legOS and the way it opens a broad range of possibilities for the RCX, but we felt the need of a more comfortable environment where to test and debug our programs.

In brief, emulegOS is C++ code you can compile and link together with your legOS code. The resulting application emulates the behavior of your code as it were running on the actual RCX.

The main features include:

• Simple visual interface that allows the user to configure the sensors and interact with them while the program is running (to simulate external events). The interface shows the current status of three motors (virtually) attached to the A, B, and C ports.

• API layer to emulate the legOS routines. Most of legOS is actually implemented, including multithreading and IR support.

• “Real world” emulation support: a place where you can put code to mimic some of the mechanical features of your robot, like a rotation sensor that turns while a motor is running, or a touch sensor that closes after X seconds a motor started.

• All the debugging facilities of your own development environment (as you compile and run your legOS code inside it).

What emulegOS is not

A full-featured bullet-proof commercial-like program. We made our best to make it bug free, but wrote it for our own use so please be tolerant. We decided to share it with other legOS users in the hope somebody else finds it useful and contributes to improve it.

If we had had more time we could have done a better product, but we were too much involved in playing with our Lego®...

Developers

• Mario Ferrari had the original idea of emulegOS and wrote the first rough prototype and the current documentation.

• Marco Beri refined and completed the job implementing the legOS multithreading scheme and making the whole project easily portable to other platforms.

• Mark Falco is the author of the first published port of emulegOS to the Linux/Unix world. He enriched his version, which is now the official version of emulegOS, with tons of useful features, LNP support among all. Mark is now the current maintainer of the project.

Feel free to send us any comment, suggestion or even heavy criticism. Any feedback is welcome and important for us to understand whether to invest more time in further enhancements. Send an e-mail just to say “I use it” or “I had a look but I don't like it”.

Requirements

You don't need to have legOS installed neither the RCX itself to use emulegOS, even if it's obvious that the main reason for the existence of emulegOS is to fine tune a program to use on an actual RCX

emulegOS is not a stand alone application. It is C/C++ code to link with your legOS code, so you need a C++ compiler to use it.

We currently have two versions:

• Linux/Unix + Tcl/Tk. Mark Falco's port for the Linux/Unix platforms. Mark wrote the gui in Tcl/Tk, a popular scripting language available on many platforms (Win, Mac, etc). This version is now the official version of emulegOS.

• Windows + CygWin This is a straight port of the Linux stuff using CygWin, it also uses Tcl/Tk.

License

emulegOS is “public domain”. Feel free to use, modify and spread its code as you prefer.

We would like very much to receive a copy of any correction, improvement or porting to new platforms. They will be published in this page crediting the contributors.

Using emulegOS

If you got used to legOS, emulegOS is quite easy to use.

Current documentation is the in README distributed with the release.

The old 0.1.7 compatible documentation is provided in HTML format: OLD emulegOS User's Guide. It is outdated but may still contain some usefull information.

Porting emulegOS

We did our best to make emulegOS easy to port:

• The GUI routines are based on Tcl/Tk, a popular scripting language available on most platforms.
• Multithreading is supported through the very well known pthreads library, available for almost every platform.
• All the communications between the legOS API emulation and the user interface is implemented with callback functions.

There's a detailed porting documentation (in HTML format) that refers to the original Windows/C++Builder version: How to port emulegOS

We recommend that you send to us an e-mail if decide to port emulegOS: we'll give you all the assitance we can.

Download

Here you can download the last versions of emulegOS:

emulegOS at SourceForge