Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
This baby had been announced prematurely at the beginning of this year when Lego Education accidentally ran its mouth in their catalogue. Now it’s finally available to the public, the HiTechnic Angle Sensor.
This thing is so ridiculously low friction when you turn it that you wouldn’t even know it was there. With it you can measure the following:
- Absolute Angle: the rotation angle of an axle from 0 degrees to 359 degrees, accurate to 1 degree.
- Accumulated Angle: the accumulated multiple rotation angle measured since the last reset function was performed.
- Revolutions per Minute (RPM): the current estimate of rotation rate from 1 RPM up to 1,000 RPM.
The absolute angle feature is a real life saver, no longer will you need touch sensors on your robots to get a recalibrate your motors’ tachos. I wish I had them when I was working on this thing: [LINK].
A driver for this sensor will be included with the next release of the Driver Suite.
I am very curious what kind of mechanism inside it, especially the ability of new zero position setting.
Hunter,
Gus from HiTechnic explains the workings of this sensor in one of the posts in this thread: https://sourceforge.net/apps/phpbb/mindboards/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=7
I have been trying to post a message, but I keep being asked to sign in. I am already signed in through my Gmail account. I would sign in through my Source Forge account, but the username must be all lowercase, and I can not figure out how to tell Mozilla Firefox to stop auto-correcting my user-name to fix capitalization.
Anyway, I think that HiTechnic COULD make an angle sensor with a through hole without changing any gearing or anything too hard. If they took a magnet slightly bigger than their axle hole, and punched a hole through it for an axle, all they would need to do is put a magnetometer above/below and another forward/backward/left/right, recalibrate, set up a new case, and be good to go. I would still keep this version available, I could imagine using it as a dial, since I normally use a tire on a servo, which isn’t all that helpful if I need three motors. Besides, you could control the NXT speaker volume without anything advanced programming or extra hardware!
Some people think that Wikipedia, Source Forge, and other open source stuff is useless because any part of it can be modified by anyone. Then there’s me, the Free Software Foundation, and the Open Source Community, but be careful, there is much debate in the OS war between the Free, the Open Source, and the Proprietary.
Technically, it is World War III, or the Web Wide Wars, and although harmless to our health, the outcome will determine our rights.
Nick,
I am not sure where you got the part where anyone can modify anything from, but I am pretty sure our Source Forge project only has 4 admins who can change anything crucial. We’re not running a wiki.
Forgot about that. I meant in terms of open source stuff and Wiki pages. Then again, even those can have “permissions”, meaning that only the “owner” can modify them, or decide who can view them. Even then, you can always make a duplicate version and modify that…