Dumping Lego NXT firmware off of an existing brick (2025)
arcanenibble.github.ioLove the way this is written with "questions" interspersed throughout to explain more about the steps taken. Adds good context that makes it very easy to follow.
+1. I knew some of those things and could skim/skip but learned a few things from the other ones. Well written.
Oh man, I had both the NXT and the original Mindstorms Lego robotics kit as a kid, brings back so many memories. I mostly made robots that tried to chase the cat around while trying to avoid falling down the stairs (half the time unsuccessfully). I even tried at one point using Java to develop programs for them, as there was a small community of people doing so online, and even some books at the local library.
Reading this article provides some great insights into the innards of the NXT which I never knew of back them (and probably also could not entirely comprehend back when I was young). This article also reminded me that I still have the NXT and all the parts sitting around in a box somewhere; maybe I should try and dig them out and make something with them, though I don't have any ideas for what I should make exactly.
> though I don't have any ideas for what I should make exactly.
That was the best part! You'd turn the box of Lego over and dump it all on the ground and sit down and start building and then suddenly you'd get inspired and an idea would pop into your head and flow mode would engage and you'd lose the next couple of hours just building whatever. Eventually mom/dad/the babysitter would pull you away for food, and maybe you'd talk them into bringing your creation to the dining table so you'd actually eat, but either way, just losing time to building things definitely formed my personality and forged my identity growing up.
My first ever programming was with the original brick, I made a scanner with the light sensor and a terrible python script that took the values from the serial port and turned them into a bitmap.
I had so much fun with Lego Mindstorms as well, we had a team at my school and we competed in First Lego league and in regional competitions. We also wrote our software in Java using LeJos one time. Because of it, I got to use git and GitHub.
Neat article, well written, and easy to understand (mostly) by a non-embedded engineer.
Does anyone know the font & colorscheme being used in the code snippets?
According to the CSS of the page, the font is "IBM VGA 9x16".
No idea about the color scheme but it's nice.
Unrelated to any of this, this font reminds of an old Turbo Pascal program I wrote years ago (decades now) to extract a VGA font from the computer's ROM and use the character bitmaps in my own graphics programs. Nice memory I would not have had if not for your question, so thank you!
Anyone reverse engineered the Smart bricks yet?
The brick itself? Probably not gonna happen anytime fast, cause that's a custom chip in there and it doesn't have easy connections to the outside world.
But the interesting part will be in scanning multiple tiles/minifigures (they have NFC iso15693 tags inside which are easily read) to come up with how they encode the sounds inside - they have about 100-ish bytes of data stored on them.
There has been work already started on reverse engineering LEGO smart bricks: https://github.com/nathankellenicki/node-smartplay/tree/main...
Jerryrigseverything has a video of him opening one up. Not really what you asked for but it scratches the itch