Abstract
The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT (http://mindstorms.lego.com/) armed with
its embedded ARM7 and ATmega48 microcontrollers (MCUs), Bluetooth
radio, four input ports, three output ports, and dozens of sensors is
proposed as an educational platform for TinyOS (http://www.tinyos.net).
The purpose of this chapter is to assess NXT for use in wireless
sensor network education. To this end, the following items are evaluated:
NXT hardware/software, LEGO MINDSTORMS "ecosystem" , and educational
elements. We outline how this platform can be used for educational
purposes due to the wide selection of available and affordable sensors.
For hardware developers, the ease of creating new sensors will be
hard to resist. Also, in the context of education, TinyOS can be
compared to other embedded operating systems based on the same hardware.
This chapter argues that this comparability facilitate across-community
adoption and awareness of TinyOS. Finally, we present the first TinyOS
project on NXT, hosted both at TinyOS 2.x contrib and SourceForge
under the nxtmote name.
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