Experiments

This is possibly the most annoying musical instrument in the world. My dogs weren’t all that impressed with it either.  It’s like the Theremin from hell without any of the redeeming features.  It is to music as ketchup is to pasta sauce. So it is not without some pride that I present to you: the Mindsensors TouchPanel Noise-a-Tron also known ...

…So I built you this LEGO contraption so you don’t need to hold that mobile phone anymore. Can you believe that my wife actually sat there patiently while I built this thing next to her?  She was complaining about her arms getting sore from holding up her mobile phone so she could read her E-Book. LEGO to the rescue!  I ...

After the initial post about my thermal imaging system using the Dexter Industries Thermal Infrared Sensor, I made some improvements with both the speed and accuracy of the whole thing. I made the sensor sampling interval time based, rather than encoder value based.  This proved to be a lot better at getting consistent sampling rates.  I also doubled the horizontal ...

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 ...

The NXT webserver has been up for a few days now and it’s really cool to see so many people logging into it to make the motor move.  When I created it, I had no idea that it was going to be used as much as it has been.  I’ve had almost 1200 views on the UStream channel and blog ...

I am currently streaming a live feed of my NXT on UStream.  You can easily control the motor on my NXT using URLs like: http://xammy.demon.nl:81/MOTA=0 – stop the motor http://xammy.demon.nl:81/MOTA=100 – run the motor at 100% clockwise http://xammy.demon.nl:81/MOTA=-50 – run the motor at 50% counter-clockwise. The power to the motor can range from –100 to 100, with 0 being “brake”. ...

After seeing the video posted on Mauro Brunato’s website, I got all sorts of ideas in my head for other cool things to do with it. With a little help from my friend SC, I managed to get my hands on one of these Kinect sensors as well. It wasn’t easy to get it working, though but with the help ...

As promised,here’s an easy to follow HOWTO for making your own VEX Cortex to NXT converter cable for I2C sensors. Please keep in mind a few things: Do this at your own risk This won’t work with sensors that require 9V to operate This won’t work with analogue sensors Do this at your own risk You will need the following: ...

So I’ve had these Dexter Industries NXTBees for about two weeks now and I’ve been working hard to come up with something cool.  Even before I received these NXTBees I spoke with John from DI about sending telemetry data from one NXT to another over a distance using these sensors. One of the potentially biggest data volume generating sensors I ...

Literally. The omniwheel is capable of going in any direction you want, it can also rotate on the spot.  So I thought, why not combine the two and make it rotate and move?  After picking Brian Davis’ sizable brain about using a gyro as a means to calculate a heading, I tweaked my old program and came up with this. ...