Robots

NXShield for Arduino This shield is designed to fit on an Arduino. It will have 4 NXT motor ports, 4 NXT sensor ports and several RC servo motor ports. It allows you to use the I2C port on the Arduino. However it will have only a single I2C bus.  That means it will work fine with multiple digital sensors as ...

After the initial post about my thermal imaging system using the Dexter Industries Thermal Infrared Sensor, I made some improvements with both the speed and accuracy of the whole thing. I made the sensor sampling interval time based, rather than encoder value based.  This proved to be a lot better at getting consistent sampling rates.  I also doubled the horizontal ...

Over at Amazon.co.uk they have the Mindstorms NXT 2.0 kit on sale. You can get it for just £176.79, down from £234.99. For those in the Euro zone, that’s down from €266 to €200. My North American readers can get a discounted one at the Amazon.com website where it’s priced down from $279.99 to $256.95. Use the links above to ...

These are the new Rotacaster wheels that arrived Monday morning. The one with the orange hub has dark grey, soft, very grippy rollers; the wheel with the dark grey hub  has slightly harder, orange rollers. These are the latest prototypes and they have undergone some great improvements; the rollers roll more freely and the hubs grip the axels in a ...

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 ...

As promised,here’s an easy to follow HOWTO for making your own VEX Cortex to NXT converter cable for I2C sensors. Please keep in mind a few things: Do this at your own risk This won’t work with sensors that require 9V to operate This won’t work with analogue sensors Do this at your own risk You will need the following: ...

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 ...

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 ...

I made some updates to the line following program for the Rotacaster One-Kit Omniwheel robot.  This version 2.0 allows you to adjust the Gain and Power variables by turning the back wheels back and forth.  When you’re happy with the values, you can hit one of the bumpers and it’ll start the auto-calibration routine and attempt to follow the course ...