Programming

I was contacted Joeri van Belle last week about a new project that he is working on, a C# project that allows you to send messages to your EV3.  Using it, you can send and receive messages between your EV3 brick and PC. On the brick you can use the standard BT communication blocks, so you can do this without ...

If you’re a fan of C#, then you will love Monobrick, a communication library that works with the EV3.  It uses the EV3’s direct commands to remote control the brick.  It works with both the NXT and the EV3.  You can simply import the library into your project and start hacking away. A simple example: using System; using MonoBrick.EV3; public ...

This is most likely the last 3.x ROBOTC release.  It fixes a couple of things, you can find the list of changes below.  Download your copy of it here: [LINK]. 3.61 to 3.62 Changelog Bug Fix: Fixed additional bug in “NXT Brick – Joystick” windows with the “Improper Argument” message box. Installer Fix: Updated Code Signing Certificate for Installers – ...

When Melanie Steiner contacted me some time ago with a question about using joystick control in combination with the Mindsensors NXTServo controller, I got curious. What was she making?  It turned out she is one of the members of a small group of students in Switzerland who were taking part in a contest.  The task was to make a system ...

This is essentially just a maintenance release with a couple of important changes.  The Changelog is small but the fixes are great (taken from the original article): NEW Joystick Configuration Utility – Added compatibility for custom joystick configurations; the Joystick Configuration Utility can now be used to configure a wide variety of controllers for use with ROBOTC. Read about it ...

I’ve started putting some of my code that I’m working on GitHub.  You can now access my repositories here: [LINK]. The first on there is my Robot Virtual Worlds Maze Crawler.  If you don’t have Git, don’t worry, you can also just download the whole thing as a zip file. Other repositories will appear on there as well at some ...

It’s finally finished and ready to be published, my Robot Virtual Worlds Maze Crawler is fully functional.  Check out the screenshot below. The engine for this robot consists of two Finite State Machines (FSM) that handle the cruising around, turning, scanning, etc.  Here’s a little video of it, doing its thing. Main FSM The main state machine consists of 5 ...

The people who watched last week’s Webinar, got a glimpse of what’s coming in ROBOTC 4.x.  I’m very excited about this as it will support two new platforms: the VEX IQ and of course the new MINDSTORMS EV3.  I’m currently working on overhauling the Driver Suite, so it will be ready for the launch of ROBOTC 4.x later in autumn ...

I wrote an article a little while back for the May/June 2013 issue of Robot Magazine entitled “Pointers and Data Structures in ROBOTC”.   You can now download the PDFs for the individual pages here!  I hope you find it useful. [Page 1] [Page 2] [Page 3] You can find the source code for the article here: [LINK].

The 3.3.1 release of the Driver Suite is hopefully the last of the 3.x series.  I’ve now started working on implementing a new architecture for Driver Suite 4.x.  Some things will change, some remain the same: Sensor related data is now kept in structs, so buffers will no longer be shared by similar sensors. Local variables will be removed or a ...