Disco Inferno

Sometimes an idea comes into existence and you wonder why the heck nobody else came up with it. My good friend Laurens Valk was working on a robot for one of his classes and asked me if there was a way to PWM the pins on the sensor port, dig0 and dig1. He needed to control a non-NXT motor without using the motor ports. I suggested he tried configuring S4 as an RS485 port and send 0xFF and a bunch of 0x00’s.  The data pin would effectively become a pulse followed by a variable length of nothing, pretty much what PWM is.

Turns out it worked, too.

Anyway, I modified it a bit and made it into a little sound sensitive light. It looks kind of cool but I am sure someone out there will come up with a much greater application for this.  If you do, let me know, I’d love to hear about it!

The code is really quite simple.  I’ve pasted it below for your convenience.

#pragma config(Sensor, S1, SOUND, sensorSoundDBA)
//*!!Code automatically generated by 'ROBOTC' configuration wizard !!*//

task main()
{
  ubyte nData[100];
  memset(nData, 0, sizeof(nData));
  nData[0] = 0xFF;

  //Set port 4 as a High Speed communication port
  nxtHS_Mode = hsRawMode;
  nxtEnableHSPort();
  nxtSetHSBaudRate(921600);

  while(true) {
    nxtWriteRawHS(nData[0], SensorValue[SOUND], 0);
    while(nxtHS_Status == HS_SENDING) EndTimeSlice();
  }
}