Squeak is a free software program which was developed in order to help children learn science and math. Moreover, if children can control a robot by Squeak, this can help them learn the basic principles of robotics. Since robot control is, in fact, the control of the microcomputer inside that robot, a microcomputer control system running on Squeak is needed. This research aims at creating this system and developing it such that it can be easily used.
At first, a communication protocol between Squeak and the microcomputer was decided. After that, the microcomputer was programmed based on the decided protocol. Using a morph that is released on the Internet, we can easily transmit data between Squeak and the serial port of the computer. With decided protocol and this morph, we can use Squeak to control the microcomputer that is connected with the serial port. In summer vacation, this system was used by about 40 children and adults to control rescue crawler robots.
The result of the survey of users’ opinions has showed two problems that this system has. First, sometimes users accidentally erased the commands. Second, what they needed is a rescue robot control system, which was not the initial aim of this research.
Since Squeak is written by Smalltalk, using Smalltalk can handle the first problem. A class contains the serial port controlling morph and every related command was made. As a result, users can't see the inside of the command. Therefore, they don't accidentally erase the command anymore. Beside that, the appearance of the morph was also changed to become more attractive. The second problem was also solved by making a rescue robot control system bases on the microcomputer control system.