Ramblings

Among the things sent to me by Dexter Industries was also the latest incarnation of the dGPS, a GPS sensor for the NXT. This latest one is equipped almost exclusively with surface mounted components, making it a lot less likely to knock off one of the capacitors and giving the sensor a very professional look.  The mounting holes on either ...

There’s a new Hispabrick Magazine out with some pretty cool stuff inside: An interesting walker by Menno Gorter (looks like he’s over his hate of NXTs) Mindstorms at this year’s Legoworld in Copenhague Part 7 of the NXT-G tutorial Part 10 of the LDraw tutorial …and much, much more! Come download your copy of it here: [LINK].

After more than 2.5 years, I’ve decided to change the old theme for a new one. It took a while before I found one that agreed with me.  This one is not too busy and has a nice high contrast. Don’t worry, the wrapper may have changed, but it’s still the same tasty inside!  I have some pretty cool stuff ...

Help the LEGO MINDSTORMS team understand more about how you use gadgets and online devices as part of your everyday life. This anonymous survey takes only a couple of minutes, and provides us with valuable information about how young people spend their time, both online and with friends. Click Here to take the survey.  [original article: here]

I’ve received a fresh batch of sensor covers in the mail so I can once again show you the gory details of various NXT sensor innards. This time I took a knife to the HiTechnic Acceleration Sensor. I’ve been curious about this one for a little while now. From the pictures below it’s quite easy to see which one of ...

The site for the Robot Virtual World (RVW) which I wrote about last week is now online.   Not all the content is there yet, the missions still have to be created but it’s a fun website and I’m sure lots of great things will continue to pop up on it.  So go check it out: [LINK].

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 ...

Yesterday, Martijn Boogaarts and I held a Mindstorms NXT workshop at the one of the offices of Sioux, a software development company. We had a room full of eager software engineers and their offspring. Martijn did the general presentation and an introduction to NXT-G.  I took care of the ROBOTC presentation and quick intro. There were plenty of NXT sets ...

There’s a very nice robotics group called Robot MC that I’ve been frequenting for the past couple of years. They gather roughly every 3rd Saturday of the month in a very small town in Belgium called Sint-Katelijne-Waver. It’s not so much a club as a group of people with similar interests. There’s no real hierarchy, no general meetings, membership fees; ...

Over on the HiTechnic blog, Gus has written up a new article about his new NXT-G sin/cos and atan2 blocks. It’s chockfull of explanations and some examples. For the speed freaks among us, you’ll be happy to know that the integer variant takes about 0.5ms to do a calculation and the floating point version takes approximately 0.75ms.  That’s pretty fast, ...