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What am I up to?

Lego Lair

Sunday morning and all is quiet in the Soldaat house.  This is the current state of my Lego Lair, as my wife likes to call it. It’s a bit of a mess and I’m starting to have trouble finding things on my desk.  When I am done writing this post, I’ll do some tidying up.

Some cool things I’m working on that I can talk about:

  • Testing the upcoming Dexter Industries GPS Sensor;
  • An enhanced version of the IR Link Power Functions library, motor control will be close the native ROBOTC NXT motor functions.  This is almost completed, needs additional comments and documentation;
  • RCX to NXT (and vice versa) messaging via IR using the IR Link, using both the standard single byte and ROBOTC’s enhanced two-byte protocol.  This is working well now. Thanks to Thorsten for testing this stuff.  It needs a bit of tidying up and documentation;
  • Playing with the new MSP430 Launchpad boards that came in the other day.  I can make the LEDs blink (!);
  • Playing with the Rotacaster wheels.

With all these peripherals, I need more USB ports on this laptop.  It has just 3 of them (plus a USB/E-SATA port).  However, that said, it comes with a genuine COM port!  That’s a pretty rare thing for modern laptops but it’s great when I am working with both the RCX IR Tower –and- the I2C protocol analyser.

It’s fun to be a tinkerer!

About Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.