Experiments

I love our dogs more than anything.  Even more than my NXTs.  I can hear you all gasp and mutter “blasphemer!”.  Now before you throw me on the fire, you must understand that I was a dog person before I was a robot person. Anyway, as I was saying, as much as I love my dogs, they have a tendency ...

Are you a budding evil scientist but lack the electronics skills to build your own sharks with laser beams?  Well, you no longer need to outsource your plans for world domination to second rate henchmen.  Now you can learn the skills needed to do this kind of thing yourself. HiTechnic have brought out the Experimenter’s Kit A, which consists of ...

In two previous articles (here and here) I had tried to come up with a way to use IR light to gauge distances.  It wasn’t very successful, but such is the risk of trying something new.  So last night, whilst sitting at my laptop, I wondered if there was a way to emulate a $10 device (a Sharp IR Sensor) ...

What is nicer than attaching a Sharp IR sensor to your NXT?  Attaching 8 of them, of course. That is what my friend Helmut wanted to do with his NXT.  Unfortunately, as good a programmer as he might be, messing around with electronics just wasn’t his “Tasse Tee” (that is cup of tea for you non-German speaking folks). 8 Sharp ...

Technorati Tags: NXTCam,Mindsensors,NXT,RobotC I got a Mindsensors NXTCam2 for my birthday last year but hadn’t had much time to play with it yet.  That is, until today.  The NXTCam2 detects objects by matching them to one of 8 user-programmable colour ranges.  The objects and their colour can then be retrieved via a few trivial I2C commands. You would think that ...

I’ve been quite busy the last few days with various performance testing.  A friend of mine is keen to develop a robo-football platform.  Due to the nature of the game, very fast sensor updates and processing is required to track the ball and the opponents.  I’ve offered to work on an extension for the NXT allowing him to hook up ...

Here’s the first release of the HiTechnic Prototype Board driver for RobotC.  It has all the basic functionality you’ll need to use it. byte HTPBReadIO(tSensors _link, byte _mask) Returns values of inputs specified by mask void HTPBWriteIO(tSensors _link, byte _mask) Writes values to outputs specified by mask void HTPBSetupIO(tSensors _link, byte _mask) Configure the ports for input or output according ...

This morning the postman delivered a small package from HiTechnic, the Lego NXT Sensor folks.  Steve, one of the engineers, asked me if I would be interested in writing a RobotC driver for their Prototype Board.  I said I was, so he told me he’d send one and here it is.  I guess now I have to fulfill my end ...

The HiTechnic IR Link Sensor allows you to use IR signals to communicate with the Power Functions IR receivers, the remote controllable Lego trains and the venerable RCX. I bought myself one a few weeks ago and have been busy tinkering with it ever since.  I contacted the HiTechnic company to ask for some documentation on how this sensor worked ...

Using a pot meter to test the MAX127 is not a hugely useful way to exploit the power of this ADC.  Instead, this time I have replaced the pot meter with an IR receiver. The main part of this circuit is still exactly the same as in the previous MAX127 post.  The only difference this time is the IR receiver, ...