Toby's journal

Does anyone know what the current status of Lego robotics and interfacing with Linux is like?
Let me explain..

My house has suffered a few power or gas failures recently. They have been entirely our fault, due to the pre-pay meter running out.
burritob suggested we should hook a webcam up and keep track of the credit that way. Hell, we might even be able to do OCR on it. As I have spare linux-compatible webcams, this would be fine, except that one of the meters needs you to press a button in order to display remaining credit.

So, I'm wondering what state Lego Robotics stuff is like these days. It all came along too late after my childhood for me to have played with it, but any excuse to get some out again is good.

Does anyone know if you can directly control stuff though? Eg. I want to write a program, that will run on Linux, that can give the Lego commands to turn motors and stuff, so I could put the webcam on a sliding rail that moves between the two meters, and has another motor that extends a rod to push the "display credit" button.
Is that sort of thing possible? I think I've seen Mindstorms demos that looked like it was all standalone - eg. you program it once, but then it just runs off and executes the program, rather than continues to receive input from the PC. I would need to have interaction with the PC though, in order to take the webcam shot at the correct time.

Any suggestions on other technology to use?