Sensors

This morning the postman delivered a small package from HiTechnic, the Lego NXT Sensor folks.  Steve, one of the engineers, asked me if I would be interested in writing a RobotC driver for their Prototype Board.  I said I was, so he told me he’d send one and here it is.  I guess now I have to fulfill my end ...

The HiTechnic IR Link Sensor allows you to use IR signals to communicate with the Power Functions IR receivers, the remote controllable Lego trains and the venerable RCX. I bought myself one a few weeks ago and have been busy tinkering with it ever since.  I contacted the HiTechnic company to ask for some documentation on how this sensor worked ...

Using a pot meter to test the MAX127 is not a hugely useful way to exploit the power of this ADC.  Instead, this time I have replaced the pot meter with an IR receiver. The main part of this circuit is still exactly the same as in the previous MAX127 post.  The only difference this time is the IR receiver, ...

It’s been a little while since my last article about adding peripherals to the NXT, but not due to the lack of experimenting and programming, let me tell you.  In my quest to tame the Maxim MAX127, I ran into a few annoying bugs in RobotC.  The first one involved not being able to use structs of bytes to send ...

If you’ve been reading my articles (1, 2) on the Mindsensors PCF8574A board but are unable to purchase one for any number of reasons, here’s a blatant clone made on a breadboard.  It will function pretty much the same way as the Real Thing but doesn’t look nearly as nice.  Below you will find the schematic and the values of ...

The Mindsensors PCF8574A board is not just suitable for making das Blinkenlights but also for controlling other ICs.  I recently thought of how I could use my old 9V motors with my NXT using a dual H-Bridge IC such as the SN754410.  This IC is pin compatible with the very popular L293D and has the same clamping diodes built-in.  It ...

About a week ago I ordered some product samples from Maxim.  I am not talking about the men’s magazine but the IC manufacturer.  Well, they got here yesterday so that’s pretty damned quick if you ask me.  I was keen to get some hard to obtain ICs for my robot projects.  I ordered 3 MAX127 12 bit 4 Channel ADCs, ...

The Mindstorms NXT is great, no doubt.  However, sometimes you’d like to be able connect non-Lego items to it.  The NXT’s ability to talk I2C, the industry standard protocol for interfacing electronic devices makes this an easy to achieve goal.  Since this was my first time hooking up anything non-Lego to my NXT, you can imagine my hesitation.  I procured ...

Next Saturday (21 July 2008 ) I am giving a presentation on the Parallax Propeller microcontroller and I thought it would be a nice idea to demo some things with it.  I have a Propeller Education Kit (PEK) and a Propeller Proto Board (PPB), kindly donated to me by Parallax.  The PEK is awesome for learning how to use the ...