| I fondly remember the Mindstorms RIS 2.0 set my parents got me for Christmas in 2001. It was the starting point of my fascination with and eventual love of computers. I'm sad to see it go (although it does live on sort of as Spike). -- Remainder of comment is a personal story -- Using this thing my dad gave me access to called "the World Wide Web", I eventually learned that people were making custom sensors for the RCX like distance sensors and proximity sensors. The first website I found is still up 20+ years later and the design is delightfully unchanged (https://www.philohome.com/sensors.htm, https://www.philohome.com/mindstorms.htm) Trying to follow these projects eventually led me to become frustrated with the block environment and I arrived at something called NQC (Not-Quite-C). It's a C-like language/environment for the RCX stock firmware. Wait, stock, there are other firmwares?? Then I learned about something called "lejos" (a Java VM for Mindstorms) through a MacWorld magazine my dad left laying around, which is how I ended up starting to learn Java. Next thing I picked up was the BASIC Stamp through the Parallax Boebot kit. I eventually started going to a local robotics club (Chibots), which exposed me to even more stuff. One member was trying to start a business making AVR eval boards for hobbyists and gave me a few samples, which is how I picked up AVRs (Arduino was still a few years away). His website went offline a few years ago. Hope he's doing alright. He and most of the club were using an environment for AVR called BASCOM AVR, which feels a lot like VB6, but for AVR. I couldn't afford the $80 it cost as a kid, so I ended up learning C because avr-gcc was free and open source software, which eventually let me to Linux and more. Being a kid was fun, but I always had trouble relating to the other kids :) |