Apart from learning about clean code the developers conference was an excellent opportunity to act out our play instinct. As a result during the conference days something cute and colorful was born, something with wings (or paddles?) that moves, reacts to its environment and now even learned to play melodies when bumping the wall.

Like father, like son: of course this one runs leJOS RCX, a tiny Java Virtual Machine for the lego mindstorm brick.

It is an amazing experience to work with restricted resources: little memory, no garbage collection, debugging with a 5 characters display … But at least there are exceptions and there are threads (albeit no Runnable interface). The latter are needed to make the leJOS act as a juke box, because the josx.platform.rcx.Sound class only buffers 8 tones and for a nice tune a little bit more is needed.