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NxOS is an open-source project aiming at building a simple and educational operating system for the Lego Mindstorms NXT platform. It is our intention to make NxOS not only a working, flexible operating system for the NXT, but also make it into an entry point for people who want to get into embedded programming. Embedded programming presents a very different set of challenges, in resource management as well as development tools and methodology. We found that it can be hard to find approachable information on these subjects, and we want to fix that. Now, can somebody please make days be longer, so that we have time to do this? ;-)

This website, still under heavy development and vastly incomplete, contains (or will contain) information about the NXT hardware platform itself and, of course, about NxOS internals. In the future, we may also put here some documentation about NxOS drivers' APIs.

• Hardware
  • The NXT platform architecture
  • Various pointer to hardware documentation for the NXT
• NxOS
  • Design overview?, for a flexible embedded operating system
  • NxOS/Kernel?
    • File system
  • NxOS/Drivers?
    • Motors?
    • Display?
    • Sound?
    • I2C remote memory units
    • Ultrasonic radar
  • Advanced communication mechanisms
    • USB
    • I2C SoftMAC (for digital sensors)
    • Bluetooth?
  • NxOS/Libraries?
    • Human-Machine Visual Interfaces?
    • Remote Robot Command
  • Coding style guidelines
• Misc
  • Cross Compilation for ARM, mandatory to write and build code for the NXT
  • Hardware debugging? with a JTAG

Source code

We use Mercurial, a wonderful distributed source control system, to host NxOS source code. You can look at the latest changes to the main repositories at NxOS Mercurial page.

First release packages?

About NxOS development

NxOS is a project lead mainly developed by David Anderson, with the help of Jérôme Flesch and Maxime Petazzoni. Its development takes place during TX52 projects at the UTBM, our computer science engineering school. The first TX52, in Spring 2007, allowed David and Jerome to build NxOS's kernel and the drivers for analog sensors, motors, display and USB communication. You can take a look at the report we wrote for the course (in French), as well as the slides we used to present our work to the jury.

We are currently (as of Sept 2007) doing a second TX52 to extend NxOS's features even more, with I2C support for digital sensors, Bluetooth communication and a scheduler.