Samples of NXT (Lego Mindstorms) programming in Haskell

I've just created a new repository on GitHub called nxt-samples. It's only got one program now, a Bumper program that has the robot going straight till it hits something, then reversing and turning a bit, and going again (inspired by this Bumper Car, even though mine has tracks and no wheel). I've put this up because I didn't find it easy to get started programming a NXT robot, even with the excellent NXT library. Samples on the web were pretty scarce.

A few things bit me:
- not waiting for the final orders to be sent to the robot before exiting the program. This got me wondering a long time why the robot wasn't performing in a consistent manner. Now I'm resetting the motors at the start and end of the program.
- I found it's more reliable to check how much the motors have moved by repeatedly and wait till you reach the amount you wanted in the first place
- I added a simple command: when you press space the robot halts and the program stops. However, this doesn't work on Windows: you need to press space AND enter. Look here to see the woeful story of a Windows only, 4 year old, GHC bug that was fixed, but then reverted as it caused regressions in Cygwin and such. Every few months, that poor bug gets pushed to next release...  I know I'm so uncool to use Windows, but really... Can Haskell be really successful without working well on the OS that a lot of corporate developers still use?

Hopefully I'll add to these samples as I go on playing with NXT... Any feedback appreciated!

Lego Mindstorms, Haskell, Windows: all set!

A new version of the NXT library has been released, and it supports Windows!! I lamented a few weeks ago that it only ran on Unix/MacOs (requiring the unix package and using Posix file descriptors), but that's a thing of the past. It was really easy to port Mitar's code to use the serialport package instead of file descriptors. Now Mitar has merged back my changes, we've tested the code on Linux and Windows, and it's been released on Hackage!

So now I can control my Lego Mindstorm robot from Haskell on my Windows machine! World domination is only a couple more steps away!

I wish to point out that Mitar's code is extremely well commented and a pleasure to work with, which of course made the adaptation to Windows a lot easier. Thank you!

Lego Mindstorms and Haskell?

Santa brought me a Lego Mindstorms kit! Suddenly the time I'm going to have available for EclipseFP is greatly reduced (I joke). I'm having fun building my first little models and fiddling with the graphical interface for programming the little beasts, but I was wondering if I could use Haskell to control the robots. Things look bleak:
- the NXT library on Hackage looks good, but requires unix... Maybe getting it to work on Windows would be easy, but I wonder...
- the fantom development kit (fantom is the low level communication API for Mindstorms, if I understand correctly) comes with a Windows version that will only work with Visual C++. It uses C++ lib and dll files whose name mangling is not compatible with MinGW.

So as a Windows and MinGW user, I'm in a bit of a ditch. I'm wondering now about the Urbi platform, that seems to be open source and to have a module for Mindstorms. It seems to provide a C++, Java and scripting interfaces, so it may be possible to get a Haskell wrapper on top of it. I wonder has anybody worked on Haskell bindings for Urbi? Might be interesting...