Programming

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 ...

The Pneuma-Snatcher is a very ugly robot based on the very nice looking Snatcher, designed by Laurens Valk. I used the two valve kits that Mindsensors sent to me a week or so ago.  They work very well for controlling the pneumatic valves.  If you hook them up to the NXTServo controller, you end up with a very nice way ...

The VEX Cortex is a nice platform made by VEX Robotics. It is supported in two programming environments, one of which is ROBOTC. Much to my dismay, the master firmware does not support I2C, which is why ROBOTC does not support it. I don’t really like it when someone tells me I can’t do something, so I went ahead and ...

Give it up for my main man Andy Milluzzi who, with some help from John Hansen, created the world’s first NXT-G block that leverages the NXT’s RS485 communication abilities! Well done. What does that mean?  Well now you can connect two bricks, back-to-back with a cable connected between their S4 ports and communicate at a blinding 921600 bps!  That’s quite ...

After spending two hours working on the changelog for the upcoming release of my driver suite, I thought I’d go play with something that was a bit more fun. I’m part of the ROBOTC for Arduino test group, which has been a lot of fun. The Arduino build does not have I2C support in the firmware yet, so I was ...

Using the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensor as an old fashioned NXT 1.0 Light Sensor as very simple in NXT-G but a little more involved in ROBOTC. The old Light Sensor uses a small red LED to illuminate the target and a small sensor to see how much was reflected. The new colour sensor can be used in a very similar ...

So you just bought yourself one of the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensors and you’re keen to get started with it. You browse through the example programs that are shipped with ROBOTC and open the “ColorSensor.c” program. “300 lines of code to read a simple colour?” you ask yourself. Fear not, it’s a lot easier than that. In order to use ...

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 ...

The fine folks at the Robotics Academy have released a new version of ROBOTC for the Cortex and PIC.  There are quite a number of changes: Updated new Master Firmware for VEX Cortex Fixed “Cannot find firmware file” download error. Additional Integrity Checks on Firmware Downloading & qualifiers are now accepted on structure elements. Improved robustness for communicating with Cortex ...

Original article here: [LINK]. Carnegie Mellon will release a fully working, downloadable “Technical Demonstration” of their new Robot Virtual World (RVW) programming tool to the world on February 9, 2011. The first world takes students to planet H99 where they will be able to program their robots using feedback from encoders, sonar, and compass sensors. The RVW project is designed ...