Experiments

If you’re like me and are the proud owner of a small room, also known as the Lego Lair, you may find that the lighting conditions in said room sometimes leave a lot to be desired.  You may not really notice this until you start using a sensor that uses light to do its thing. Take the NXTCam for example.  ...

Programming the NXT is nice.  However, sometimes you run into limits that you think shouldn’t be there.  This morning I hit one of those and scratched my head: “How to fix this?”.  Normally there are 4 timers at your disposal in ROBOTC (this also goes for NXC, as far as I am aware of).  I am not sure why we ...

Meet BobBot Mk2, the intellectually challenged robot.  This subsumption based robot is probably the most challenging robot I’ve ever had to program.  It has quite a number of sensors: Mindsensors NXTCamV3 Mindsensors Magic Wand Mindsensors Dist-nx HiTechnic Sensor MUX HiTechnic EOPD LEGO Touch Sensor x 2 LEGO US Sensor Subsumption is not something I have an awful lot of experience ...

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to do something with the RAMTRON FM24V10 chips that I got as a sample some time last year. They’re I2C EEPROM drop-in replacements, meaning they are functionally and electrically identical to the standard ones we see everywhere.  Their main advantage over standard I2C EEPROM chips is that you don’t have the 5ms delay ...

I’ve been meaning to build something cool with the NXTCamV3 for a while now but never got around to it. I tried making the Omniwheel suitable for the NXTCam but unfortunately the wheels cause way too much vibration when the robot moves.  Oh well, in the not so distant future I hope to pick up a few of these babies: ...

Philo has come up with another rather awesome NXT hack.  Using a Power Functions IR receiver, some additional components and a lot of creativity, he has made it possible to send up to 9 different combinations to the NXT using your PF remote.  For all the details and large pictures of how to achieve this feat, make sure you check ...

Mindsensors was kind of enough to send me one of their prototype sensors, the Power Meter, to play with.  It’s a sensor that allows you to measure, among other things, the current and voltage of anything you care to connect to it (within limits, of course).  The first thing that came to mind was building something that would log the ...

In an earlier article I wrote, I tested how fast I could push the HiTechnic ProtoBoard and the MAX127 ADC under ROBOTC.  In a recent discussion with Deepak from Mindsensors, I2C speeds in ROBOTC on the NXT came up.  The questions arose about the most efficient read size for the NXT and if there was a ceiling or a cut-off ...

I’ve had my ArduinoMega for almost 2 weeks now and until today I had no luck getting it to work as an I2C slave with the NXT.  The NXT is a finicky beast when it comes to I2C.  It’s really not all that standard and requires very high pull-ups (82K) for the NXT to be able to pull the lines ...

Having read the countless articles, websites and hearing about it from friends, I’ve decided to jump on the Arduino bandwagon.  I bought one of the new ArduinoMega boards with a very nice shield and some other things.    The ArduinoMega is an Arduino compatible board with an ATmega1280 controller that has 128KB flash, 8KB SRAM and 4KB EEPROM.  It has ...