The CNAN Links Page

last updated 21 March 2000

• The official Lego Mindstorms home page. If you're playing with NQC, you probably have (or at least want) a Mindstorms set; this is where you should look for product info. If there's no one selling them in your area, try the Lego World Shop.
• Dave Baum's Not Quite C home page. Dave reverse-engineered the RCX to create NQC so he could write RCX programs on the Macintosh; versions are available for the Mac (using the freeware Macintosh Programmer's Workshop), Linux, Irix, Windows whatever, and several other environments. A link from that page also leads to Dave's book.
• The lego-robotics page at Crynwr.com, maintained by Russell Nelson, is a large (and therefore rather unwieldy) link that covers virtually everything you will ever need to locate on building robots with Lego sets. It is very comprehensive and covers much more than just NQC.
• RCX Internals by Kekoa Proudfoot is the most comprehensive breakdown of the internals of the RCX in existence. It also includes several useful tools for handling firmware downloads and such. It is not NQC specific (in fact, Kekoa seems to prefer working in the bare hex), but it is still very useful.
• The site for The Unofficial Guide to Lego Mindstorms by Jonathan Knudsen has updates to his excellent O'Reilly book (the one with the mechanical bunny on the cover). His book, though written solely for RIS 1.0, is still very useful for teaching the basics of robotic design, and the programming information still applies (though the models have changed a bit since 1.5 came out).
• Blatant self-plug: if you want to know what robot kit to buy, check out my What Set Should I Buy? FAQ. It is a basic introduction to all the sets in the Mindstorms line, as well as Dacta ROBOLAB and the two Technic 'bot kits, Cybermaster and CodePilot. I keep it as up to date as I can, though it's really intended for beginning robot hackers and therefore doesn't have as much useful information as I'd normally add.