Raspberry Pi support

[jverne]

Porting my work to Raspberry Pi running some sort of Linux should be doable.

[jverne]

This isn't going to happen unless I figure out the legacy USBTower stuff or do whatever you need to do on Linux to get a USB device working for sending commands.

[mesheets]

I think perhaps the two of us were in contact back on the original NQC project site on SourceForge? I later created the BrickBot organization on GitHub as a way to archive the many RCX-targeting open source projects that seemed to be gradually disappearing from the Internet.

In the fork of the code under the BrickBot org, there is the source code support for Linux (c.f. https://github.com/BrickBot/nqc/blob/master/rcxlib/RCX_USBTowerPipe_linux.cpp), and I have had NQC built and running on Linux, so unless there are some idiosyncrasies specific to the Raspberry Pi, I would expect it to be able to build and run. I even created NQC-related packages for the Slitaz Linux system (c.f. https://pkgs.slitaz.org/?package=nqc). There is version of Slitaz that supports Raspberry Pi, but I have not checked to see whether those NQC packages are available and/or work on the Raspberry Pi build.

If alternative references for comparison might be needed, some of the other projects I have worked have included USB functionality on Linux, and there is a LEGO USB tower driver that needs to be installed. A few projects include cross-compiled USB support for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. The lnpmsg code, which I incorporated into the BrickOS-Bibo project from the legOShrink project might provide some example. The BrickOS project included the cross-compiled capabilities for some of its host utilities like lx, so I tried to combine some things to avoid code duplication and make it easier to reuse.

(Of course, since NCQ programs are designed to run on Lego's firmware, they won't run on BrickOS-Bibo, but the USB code should at least be useful for the purposes here.)

Also, another interesting project based on NQC is VisualNQC (originally called fUNSoftWare). That was another project from the SourceForge era, and it basically provides an slightly more powerful alternative to Lego's official visual programming software. VisualNQC generates NQC code, and then from there the NQC code could be compiled and downloaded using the capabilities provided by the NQC project.

That project (with updates) is also available under the BrickBot organization at VisualNQC.