Ramblings

On my continuing mission to take apart HiTechnic sensors and show you guys their guts, I present to you: The Gyro.  The little yellow/gold component on the right of the PCB is the actual gyro chip, the rest of the components most likely to deal with power conditioning.  There’s not a whole lot to tell about this board since there’s ...

Taken from XKCD.

Be sure to let your grand parents know about this. Thanks.

I’ve had my ArduinoMega for almost 2 weeks now and until today I had no luck getting it to work as an I2C slave with the NXT.  The NXT is a finicky beast when it comes to I2C.  It’s really not all that standard and requires very high pull-ups (82K) for the NXT to be able to pull the lines ...

A new version of the colour sensor has been brought out by HiTechnic.  It features a number of new abilities: Increased sensitivity; the sensor can determine a large object’s colour from up to 20 cm away. No longer needs an RGB LED but uses a bright white LED instead.  The RGB values are determined by the very sensitive colour sensor. ...

Having read the countless articles, websites and hearing about it from friends, I’ve decided to jump on the Arduino bandwagon.  I bought one of the new ArduinoMega boards with a very nice shield and some other things.    The ArduinoMega is an Arduino compatible board with an ATmega1280 controller that has 128KB flash, 8KB SRAM and 4KB EEPROM.  It has ...

Did you just buy a Wii-mote for a robotics project and you can’t wait to use it?  If you have a 15-tonne hydraulic grappling arm at your disposal, you could do what these guys did. I am sure this beats the crap out of whatever you had in mind of controlling with that Wii-mote.  Feeling inadequate yet? [Source: Entity Crisis ...

“Subsumption?” I hear you say, “What’s that?”  Subsumption is a form of behaviour based robotics where multiple behaviours can control a robot using a hierarchical system.  However, don’t take my word for it!  Check out Thom Roach’s great new blog.  He’s written some really ace articles on the subject without reverting to dry stuffy theory like you see in most ...

Ever wondered what an IR Seeker V2 looks like on the inside but didn’t have a spare $50 you could just throw away?  Well wonder no more!  I was given a pre-production IR Seeker by HiTechnic to write a RobotC driver for it.  The lens cap on it wasn’t as clear as the production version so they sent me a ...

For all your Mindsensors specific questions and ideas, you can now point your browsers to their own forums here: [LINK].  Right now it’s still a little quiet, but there’s a small but knowledgeable crowd of sensor beta testers and seasoned robotics programmers ready to answer (most of) your questions. So come over, introduce yourself and ask away.