Sensors

After a long time between releases, I am proud to present to you the latest version of the ROBOTC Driver Suite. The biggest new addition to this version is support for the new HiTechnic SMUX sensor. Adding support for this new sensor involved modifying almost every single driver for the HiTechnic sensors to add the ability to poll the sensors ...

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 ...

Another release with some changes and additions: HTAC-driver.h: Fixed bad registers Added HTACreadAllAxes(tSensors link, int &x, int &y, int &z) Removed HTACreadAllAxes(tSensors link, tIntArray &data) Changed HTACreadX, Y, Z to use by reference instead of as return value HTIRS-driver.h: Fixed wrong registers HTEOPD-driver.h: Added HTEOPDsetShortRangeNW and HTEOPDsetLongRangeNW, these don’t wait 10ms Changed the underlying sensor types for ROBOTC 1.57A and ...

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. ...

I love our dogs more than anything.  Even more than my NXTs.  I can hear you all gasp and mutter “blasphemer!”.  Now before you throw me on the fire, you must understand that I was a dog person before I was a robot person. Anyway, as I was saying, as much as I love my dogs, they have a tendency ...

Are you a budding evil scientist but lack the electronics skills to build your own sharks with laser beams?  Well, you no longer need to outsource your plans for world domination to second rate henchmen.  Now you can learn the skills needed to do this kind of thing yourself. HiTechnic have brought out the Experimenter’s Kit A, which consists of ...

In two previous articles (here and here) I had tried to come up with a way to use IR light to gauge distances.  It wasn’t very successful, but such is the risk of trying something new.  So last night, whilst sitting at my laptop, I wondered if there was a way to emulate a $10 device (a Sharp IR Sensor) ...

Some minor changes in this version and some bug fixes. Changelog: HTDIR-test1.c (0.2) Partial rewrite by Dick Swan, waits a little longer for sensor initialisation Nicer intro screen Less screen flickering, only updated if there’s been a change in data. common.h: (0.3.2) makes use of the new alpha’s built-in clearI2CBus(). It is still defined for the older firmwares MSLL-driver.h: (0.5) ...

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 ...

A new version of the RobotC Driver Suite has been released.  A driver for the Mindsensors LineLeader sensor was added.  The initial driver was written by Thom Roach and modified by me to fit better into the suite’s framework.  Thank you Thom for your work! Changelog: Many drivers had their API renamed subtly to be more consistent.  Check the individual ...