I'm in the preliminary stages of a design for a robot. I was wondering if it were possible to interface a lego RCX brick to larger servo and/or stepper motors. At worst, a simple reed switch to count pulses from a standard motor with a lobe on it would suffice.
I currently do not have an RCX to experiment with, but the results of your answer would push me to purchase one.
The parameters: I need to interface an RCX to 12 volt motors capable of moving about 20-40 lbs.
Could I get away with relays or transistors of some kind to drive a higher voltage source for these larger motors?
The finished design would have to keep track of 2-5 motors, but only drive 2 or 4 at the most. Can the RCX multitask? Can it issue a "drive" command to 2 motors at the same time, while it's polling more than one sensor?
Is the RCX suitable, or should I be looking at more expensive uCs?