Hull Pixelbots with ChildDyamix

Answering questions...

Spent a great evening with a bunch of folks from Child Dynamix. I showed off the Hull Pixelbots and then we had a go at programming them in HullOS. Such fun. 

HullOS in the Hull Pixelbot

I've spent a day having some "quality time" with the Hull Pixelbot scripting language. Which is now called HullOS.

The idea is that the computer in the robot (which can be a lowly Arduino Uno) is entirely responsible for converting the plain text of the program into actions. The behaviour will be rather reminiscent of the early 8 bit computers like the BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum, which had built in BASIC. They had tiny processors a bit like the one in the Arduino, but they had a lot more RAM than I've got. However, I've just about managed it. A typical program will look a bit like this:

do
    if %dist<10
        yellow
        move -10
    else
        green
    endif
forever

This HullOS program would make a "cowardly robot". The program repeatedly reads the distance sensor. If the robot is less than 10 cm from something it turns the pixel yellow and moves backwards. Otherwise it turns the pixel green. 

There are a few things to sort out, but I'm rather pleased with how it is going. And I've still got around 500 bytes of memory left....