I wrote about the Edison Kickstarter campaign a few years back, in 2014, in fact. The company is still going strong and are onto version 2.0 of their Edison robot. Recently, I was contacted by them to take a peek at what they were working on next. The new web-based programming environment, called EdBlocks, is a complete redesign of the ... Read More »
The fine folks at Mindsensors have done something pretty cool! You’ve probably heard of Blockly, a very popular graphical programming language. In most cases, you had to run it on a remote website or on your own computer and download whatever code you created to your robot. Well, with the PiStorms you no longer have to! Because it’s based on ... Read More »
When I am doing development on ROBOTC, I find I am switching back and forth a lot between Visual Studio 2013 and the ROBOTC IDE. Personally, I prefer the font that VS2013 uses by default, which is Consolas. It’s friendly to the eyes and looks crisp. ROBOTC, on the other hand, will use Courier New as its default, which I find ... Read More »
So, you like Raspberry Pi but would prefer to build with LEGO? No problem! You can use the Mindsensors PiStorms to add a touch screen, buttons and motor and sensor ports to your Pi. The designs for the LEGO Technic compatible parts that come with this are completely open source and available for anyone to tweak as they see fit. ... Read More »
A little while back, the Lejos forums were getting reports that some of the newly purchased bricks were having issues with Bluetooth connections. Andy Shaw, one of the main developers of this project, determined that the main cause was a newly updated Bluetooth chipset in this brick. Unlike its predecessor, this chipset is BT 4.0 capable. That means that, at least ... Read More »
There are many books out there for the budding robotics fan who wants to hone his or her programming skills. This is a book that fills that need very nicely. Terry Griffin’s “The Art of LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Programming” is a great No Starch Press publication. While some books focus on building, others and both building and programming, this one has deep ... Read More »
Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots