Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
It’s been a little while since my last article about adding peripherals to the NXT, but not due to the lack of experimenting and programming, let me tell you. In my quest to tame the Maxim MAX127, I ran into a few annoying bugs in RobotC. The first one involved not being able to use structs of bytes to send ...
Read More »Attack of the Clones
If you’ve been reading my articles (1, 2) on the Mindsensors PCF8574A board but are unable to purchase one for any number of reasons, here’s a blatant clone made on a breadboard. It will function pretty much the same way as the Real Thing but doesn’t look nearly as nice. Below you will find the schematic and the values of ...
Read More »NXT Connector Breadboard Hack
To the left are the fruits of about an hour’s worth of hack-sawing, soldering and hot gluing. If you can’t see from the pictures what it is, let me explain. It’s one of the Mindsensors NXT connectors attached to a cut-to-size prototype copper strip board. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world but it works. I hot glued a ...
Read More »Motor Control with the Mindsensors PCF8574A
The Mindsensors PCF8574A board is not just suitable for making das Blinkenlights but also for controlling other ICs. I recently thought of how I could use my old 9V motors with my NXT using a dual H-Bridge IC such as the SN754410. This IC is pin compatible with the very popular L293D and has the same clamping diodes built-in. It ...
Read More »Thanks Maxim
About a week ago I ordered some product samples from Maxim. I am not talking about the men’s magazine but the IC manufacturer. Well, they got here yesterday so that’s pretty damned quick if you ask me. I was keen to get some hard to obtain ICs for my robot projects. I ordered 3 MAX127 12 bit 4 Channel ADCs, ...
Read More »Expanding the NXT with the PCF8574A
The Mindstorms NXT is great, no doubt. However, sometimes you’d like to be able connect non-Lego items to it. The NXT’s ability to talk I2C, the industry standard protocol for interfacing electronic devices makes this an easy to achieve goal. Since this was my first time hooking up anything non-Lego to my NXT, you can imagine my hesitation. I procured ...
Read More »Determining Object Distance with Infrared
Next Saturday (21 July 2008 ) I am giving a presentation on the Parallax Propeller microcontroller and I thought it would be a nice idea to demo some things with it. I have a Propeller Education Kit (PEK) and a Propeller Proto Board (PPB), kindly donated to me by Parallax. The PEK is awesome for learning how to use the ...
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