Robots

‘s robot! Yes, that’s right, you can reach out and play with Laurens’ Alpha Rex over the Big Interwebs!  He made a cool looking web interface for it and allows you check out what it’s doing via a webcam! I did something similar a while back but not nearly as cool looking as this!  Go check it out before it’s ...

This is a quick video I shot with my mobile phone of a new robot called Skittles. Why did I call it Skittles, you ask?  Well, it’s got all colours in the rainbow in it because I simply don’t have enough bricks of one or two colours to build the whole thing uniformly.  So I figured I may as well ...

I was working on an omniwheeled robot last night, trying some code that would ensure the vehicle would go straight even if the motors were not perfectly in sync.  Unfortunately, there seemed to be a bit of a bug in the code which lead to some pretty erratic behaviour. So as you can see, not all of my projects are ...

OpenElectrons, the non-NXT company of Mindsensors, has released a smaller version of their NXShield-M that fits a normal Arduino Duemilanove or Uno.  This one doesn’t have as many servo connections as the NXShield-M (which has an insane number of servo connectors) but has a smaller form factor. You can attach up to 4 NXT motors and 4 NXT sensors as ...

The Teemino As I mentioned in an earlier post, OpenElectrons (Mindsensors) have released the Teemino and will soon release a shield (NXShield-M) that is compatible with this board and the ArduinoMega. Lucky for me, one of each of these arrived in the post this morning, unlucky for me, I don’t have a phone that runs Android 2.3.1, a prerequisite for ...

When National Geographic contacted me last week about writing an article about a robotics article they had published on the web I must say I was quite surprised. The article itself is a very interesting one.  It asks the question whether we are ready for all the robots that are slowly coming into our every day lives. Personally, I think ...

After a prolonged hibernation period, the Mindsqualls project is back from the dead and version 2.0 has been released. I was using an older version in my super secret Kinect project, so it is nice to see that is being maintained again. Mindsqualls is one of the easiest to use .Net library for controlling your NXT using C# or VB.Net. ...

The NXTLog website has a very cool challenge up! I blatantly stole the article below from the NXT Step. Original article: [LINK] There are robot explorers all over the world and even on Mars! We are challenging you this summer to invent the NXT great generation of explorer robots with your MINDSTORMS NXT. Will your robot explore the desert, the ...

Dexter Industries are currently developing a great new sensor, a proper 6 Degree of Freedom (DOF) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) for the NXT. It consists of two sensors on a single board; a 3-D gyroscope and a 3-D accelerometer. Both sensors can measure their respective values on the X, Y and Z axes. The sensor, like many of the other ...

HiTechnic have released a new sensor: a barometric sensor that can also measure temperature! If you ever wanted to make your own weather station, then this is perfect for the job! It measures the pressure in 1/1000th of an inch of Mercury, which can easily be converted other units like Pascal and PSI. The temperature is measured in 1/10th degrees ...