Lego Mindstorms Programming - which language/IDE do you use/recommend?

programming-languages robotics mindstorms lego nxt
CodeAndCats picture CodeAndCats · Mar 20, 2009 · Viewed 12.1k times · Source

I'm new to it and currently using the visual flow-chart like language that the Lego Mindstorms IDE uses. I'm impressed with how readable the diagramming language is but missing the flexiblity of actual code. I'm imagining complicated projects I want to try out and don't really want to implement them as a gigantic flow chart! lol :)

I know there are other languages/IDEs you can use but not really sure what they are or which to use. What IDE/language do you recommend for programming Lego Mindstorms projects?

I'd prefer an IDE that still allows me to hit Run and send the program down to the NXT brick via bluetooth and run it immediately.

UPDATE: I ended up choosing lejos. Mainly because I've just started learning Java at work which is very similar to C# which I'm already familiar with. I would recommend Lejos since Java is a great high level, feature-rich language and there are nice IDE's for it. Eclipse is a great IDE which lejos has a plugin for and ant build scripts make building your project, loading it to the NXT brick and running it on the device a one step process. Lejos does require special firmware on your NXT brick but that went fine and you can always put your old Mindstorms firmware back on later if you want.

If you want to check out other language and IDE options I'd highly recommend this chart I stumbled across: http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html

Answer

CodeAndCats picture CodeAndCats · Jul 5, 2009

FYI, I came across this extremely helpful feature comparison chart of different languages which you can program the NXT in:

http://www.teamhassenplug.org/NXT/NXTSoftware.html

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