The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT (
http://mindstorms.lego.com/.)—
armed with its embedded ARM7 and ATmega48 microcontrollers (MCUs), Bluetooth radio, four input ports, three output ports, and dozens
of sensors—is proposed as an educational platform for TinyOS. (
http://www.tinyos.net.) The purpose of this chapter is to assess NXT for use in wireless sensor network education. To this end, the following items
are evaluated: NXT hardware/software, LEGO MINDSTORMS “ecosystem”, and educational elements. We outline how this platform
can be used for educational purposes due to the wide selection of available and affordable sensors. For hardware developers,
the ease of creating new sensors will be hard to resist. Also, in the context of education, TinyOS can be compared to other
embedded operating systems based on the same hardware. This chapter argues that this comparability facilitate across-community
adoption and awareness of TinyOS. Finally, we present the first TinyOS project on NXT, hosted both at TinyOS 2.x contrib and
SourceForge under the
nxtmote name.