I remember my excitement when LEGO launched their Mindstorm NXT product line. I grew up with LEGO and was always a fan of the Technic line letting a small child experiment with mechanical designs without physical dangers of fabrication shop tools. Building an intuitive grasp of the powers of gear reduction was the first big step on my learning curve of mechanical design.

Starting with simple machines that were operated by hand cranks and levers, LEGO added actuators like pneumatic cylinders and electric motors. This trend eventually grew to programmable electronic logic. Some of the more affordable Mindstorm products only allowed the user to select between a few fixed behaviors, but with the NXT it became possible for users to write their own fully general programs.

Lego Mindstorm NXT Smart Brick

At this point I was quite comfortable with programming in languages like C, but that was not suitable for LEGO's intended audience. So they packaged a LabVIEW-based programming environment that is a visual block-based system like today's Scratch & friends. It lowered the barrier to entry but exacted a cost in performance. The brick is respectably powerful inside, and many others thought it was worthwhile to unlock its full power. I saw enough efforts underway that I thought I'd check back later... and I finally got around to it.

Over a decade later now, I see Wikipedia has a long list of alternative methods of programming a LEGO Mindstorm NXT. My motivation to look at this list came from Jim Dinunzio, a member of Robotics Society of Southern California, presenting his project TotalCanzRecall at the February 2019 RSSC meeting. Mechanically his robot was built from the stock set of components in a NXT kit, but the software was written with RobotC. Jim reviewed the capabilities he had with RobotC that were not available with default LEGO software, the most impressive one being the ability to cooperatively multitask.

A review of information on RobotC web site told me it is almost exactly what I had wanted when I picked up a new NXT off the shelf circa 2006. A full IDE with debugging tools among a long list of interesting features and documentation to help people learn those features.

Unfortunately, we are no longer in 2006. My means of mechanical construction has evolved beyond LEGO to 3D-printing, and I have a wide spectrum of electronic brainpower at my disposal from a low-end 8-bit PIC Microcontrollers (mostly PIC16F18345) to the powerful Raspberry Pi 3, both of which can already be programmed with C.

There may be a day when I will need to build something using my dusty Mindstorm set and program it using RobotC. When that day comes I'll go buy a license of RobotC and sink my teeth into the problem, but that day is not today.