Sensors

This is what the NXT should’ve had in the first place!  Thank goodness for companies like Mindsensors.  They’ve created the first touch panel sensor for the NXT that sits on top of the standard screen and allows you to draw and press on it with a stylus. I haven’t got it yet but I just got a mail saying that ...

What’s this?  Two Exposed posts in two days?  What is this madness? To be honest I’ve been wanting to cut HiTechnic’s new Barometric Sensor open since I got it a while back.  I held off while it wasn’t on sale yet since I couldn’t really write about it anyway.  However, now that it’s out there in the wild and I ...

This Exposed episode is brought to you by Team R.A.B.B.I.  My first thought when opening the envelope from them was “Oh wow, thanks!”  My second thought was “I wonder what these look like on the inside.”  It must’ve taken a lot of restraint but I managed to not open them until at least an hour later.  They did not disappoint.  ...

Microsoft has released a new refresh of the Kinect SDK. The new beta has a few driver updates and some run time enhancements.  They also worked on improving the documentation. More information about the latest Kinect SDK update can be found on the official website: [LINK] You can download the 32bit SDK here: [LINK]. The 64bit SDK can be found ...

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 ...

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 ...

The Kinect SDK is here and the tutorial series of basic fundamentals on it also arrived: The Kinect SDK Beta download: [LINK] Installing and using the Kinect sensor: [LINK] Camera fundamentals: [LINK] Skeletal Tracking fundamentals: [LINK] Audio fundamentals: [LINK] Depth data directives: [LINK] Via [Kinect Hacks] Now I can finally work on my project!

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 ...

Having spent most of yesterday hacking and optimizing the firmware for the new Dexter Industries Thermal IR Sensor, I thought I would go ahead and make something fun with it today. I built a pan and tilt rig for the sensor with a great deal of gearing down to allow me to take a lot of measurements as the rig ...