well the idea was to turn this crappy old laptop with a bad hard drive, into a remote control console of sorts for my lego nxt. it would have a simple video capture device so i could hook up wireless camera receiver that i have (right now i use an old tv). it would also have bluetooth for wireless control of the nxt, and a joystick for input (which once everything is working up hackishly add to the laptop's spare battery compartment with a dremel and some epoxy).
now there was a windows application called nxtender that came our in 2006 which doesnt seem to work as advertised on vista64. its supposed to send joystick data to the nxt and allow the nxt to control some aspects of windows (keyboards for example). i was really only intrested in the joystick control aspects. most remote control applications for the nxt suck, basically just allowing you to control how fast the motors turn, with no processing on the nxt side. theyre are adequate for controling bots with tank steering. seeing as my power plant of choice is a lego pneumatic engine, i will need to have car type steering control that can recenter itself when no input is given. there is also the 4 speed transmission which operates on several camshafts and requires the motor to turn a specific amount to switch to a specific gear, controlling this manually tends to chew up the gears in the transmission. so software on the nxt will process the joystick commands from the computer, and nxtender was the only program which could do that.
anyway the xp machine was intended to run nxtender, however bluetooth wouldnt work without sp2 at least, and installing that couldn't be done with the limited drive space on hand, i then used nlite to make a custom xp iso. since i dont have any blank discs at all, i used a proggie to create an installer on a bootable usb device. all while forgetting that the computer cant boot to usb. fortunately i found a pirate copy of xp in one of my cd cases which had xpsp3 on it. i re-installed from that cd and now my bluetooth works, and left me about 600 megs to work with. and while the bluetooth works, i still cant get nxtender to work. i think the program may have been built on a vista 32 machine which would explain why i cant use it on 64 or xp. this puts me back to square one.
there is also vlite for vista, i could probably spin out a very lightweight version of vista, but i very much doubt it will fit in the space allowed. my good laptop kinda needs an os reinstall, so i may just install vista32 on that machine and try from there. if i cant get nxtender to run on that then there are a multitude of code libraries for controlling the nxt so i may just write my own software based off of that (and probibly sdl, which ive used before). this would open up the linux possibility. probably a lightweight distro (slax live cd works well on that laptop). im really not familiar with linux's drivespace requirements.
of course if worst comes to worst il ditch the nxt all together and use my arduino.
