Ramblings

I recently bought an ODROID GO to do some development on, and learn more about FreeRTOS. The ODROID GO is a small, handheld, Gameboy sized ESP32-WROVER based device. It is super cheap, about €45 or so, and packs a real punch. The screen is a lovely 320×240 TFT LCD. I first started playing with it, using the Arduino development environment, ...

When I am doing development on ROBOTC, I find I am switching back and forth a lot between Visual Studio 2013 and the ROBOTC IDE. Personally, I prefer the font that VS2013 uses by default, which is Consolas. It’s friendly to the eyes and looks crisp. ROBOTC, on the other hand, will use Courier New as its default, which I find ...

So, you like Raspberry Pi but would prefer to build with LEGO?  No problem!  You can use the Mindsensors PiStorms to add a touch screen, buttons and motor and sensor ports to your Pi.  The designs for the LEGO Technic compatible parts that come with this are completely open source and available for anyone to tweak as they see fit. ...

A little while back, the Lejos forums were getting reports that some of the newly purchased bricks were having issues with Bluetooth connections.  Andy Shaw, one of the main developers of this project, determined that the main cause was a newly updated Bluetooth chipset in this brick.  Unlike its predecessor, this chipset is BT 4.0 capable.  That means that, at least ...

If you’re looking to expand your collection of toys to play with or simply can’t pass up a good bargain, check out the clearance sale at Mindsensors.com! There’s a lot of stuff there, so go take a look!  The sale runs until August 21 2015, so don’t wait too long!  

OpenElectrons are continuing their development of awesome stuff for the RPi.  This new product, the PiStorms is a “shield” for the RPi that allows you to connect up to 4 EV3/NXT motors and up to 4 EV3/NXT sensors.  It has a screen on it and can be programmed using a Python API. The RPi communicates with the PiStorms shield through ...

RoboSnap is a a very compact vision system for the RPi and EV3.  It is based on the very popular PixyCam (CMUCam5) but in a much more compact package. Capable of much more than simply recognising colours, RoboSnap can also detect simple shapes like triangles, rectangles, circles.  It can return provide size, location and colour for these objects, as well ...

The other day, I ordered some Raspberry Pi bits and pieces from my local supplier called SOSSolutions.  Among the parts were a Raspberry Pi B V2 and a very fancy looking Pimeroni  Pibow Coupé Ninja.  I noticed the lettering was a bit deeper and slightly less clear than my red Coupé, which I had purchased previously, but it was nothing ...

I am going to The Big Bang event in about 2 weeks from now.  What is this event, you ask?  It’s a fair for students to learn more about science and technology.  There will be demonstrations, workshops, activities and much, much more.  The UK National VEX Championships are also being held there, so that’ll be super exciting. This year, the venue is in Birmingham ...

I was invited by Hakan, a Computer Science teacher at the Metis Montessori Lyceum (a secondary level school), to be a guest speaker at the Metis CoderDojo in Amsterdam last weekend and it was so much fun!  The theme for the day was line following robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS.  I was a little intimidated at first, nothing is scarier than ...