What are your interests, how long do you have to create a program, what experience do you have and is spending money an option?

Hi there,
Well i'm interested in web development,and the project should take 5 or 6 months, the experience is in Visual studio.net and HTML and also i'm learning ASP.net ,spending money maybe an option

Well i wont be much good there. I was hoping to hear something about C and i was going to recommend maybe a little robotics project.

Hi, I am also starting to think about my final year project, in Computer Science. Can you tell me more about what you have in mind for the robotics project?

Well I have experience in taking a lego mindstorm brick http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/default.asp and rewriting its operating system to that of http://brickos.sourceforge.net so that you can write programs (using brickos) in the c language that the brick can process to do many different types of tasks. Basically your options are wide open. If given the correct sensors (either bought or homemaid) you could program it to navigate a maze, either by dead reckoning, right hand rule, or writing a more sophisticated AI. But there are many other types of projects you could do.

This can be done in windows or linux (i did this project in linux) so i know how to create the gcc cross compiler and other stuff (but the information for all of this is on the web) . Windows will use cgywin and a friend of mine has found a windows setup file to configure a computer with cygwin and the cross compiler.

If you have any more questions just ask. I found this quite interesting.

That REALLY sounds fun!

Sauce, do you know of anywhere to buy a nice robotics programming package? Possibly for C++? That sounds really fun, but I can't seem to find much.

The school I went to just brought them from the mindstorm website. You can find the "brick", which is the part with the processor on ebay, and you just use regular legos to actually build the robot.

The brickos is suppose to support C and CPP using classes that are already built for you or you could build your own.

And of course if you dont want to go with the lego version there is always MIT's origional version.

http://handyboard.com/software/

p.s. I was surprised how easy brickos made everything for the programmer. If you are really curious, you could download brickos's source and see how everything is actually run.

I have been looking into this and this seems like a really good idea, thanks!! I have a few questions, which kit would be the best to buy from lego? Is there different types, i.e. 'the Acrobot--a fast moving robot that flips and dances; and the Inventorbot--a smart, attentive robot that can greet you and help you in many other ways'.

If so which would be the best to purchase? Can you use the brickOS with windows?

Im trying to think of something that I can program this robot to do, walking around a maze might not be the most exciting thing for my lecturers to mark. I was think of trying to do something along the lines of, completing a task that helps to make something easier for someone.

Any ideas?

Also, would there be much difference in the lego brick and the technik one? Thanks

I had an Inventorbot kit, which includes all the lego pieces to make the acrobat and etc. After you have the brick you can use the lego pieces you get from the kit or even any other lego pieces you have laying around. I'm not sure what the difference between a lego brick and technik's brick but BrickOS was created to run on the Hitachi-H8 microprocessor that is in the Lego brick, so if technik is not using that microprocessor you are out of luck.

You cannot use brickOS directly with windows, but you can use it with cygwin, which emulates linux. I have not done it this way, but here is the link to the cygwin install method from the brickOS website. http://brickos.sourceforge.net/docs/INSTALL-cygwin.html

As far as making something easier for someone, i have no idea.