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There have been some good videos posted by people who have modified the robobasic code and the RN-1. You can find a lot of examples of it up on the robosavvy.com forums. Both under RoboNova as well as home built. Awhile ago there were videso posted by Bauermech with his extreamily modified Robonova-1.
The RN1 controller card uses an ATMEL Atmega128 chip. There are free C and C++ compilers for it. A very popular one is called Winavr. I normally find it by browsing on theavrfreaks.net/ web site.
The difficulty is that hitec did not make it easy to download new programs to the board. There are whole threads about this up on robosavy.com. I believe there are now some utilities that some members have built that allow you to download to the board.
Good Luck