Sensors

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 ...

Dexter Industries have been very busy with their latest creation: a WiFi sensor for your NXT! I have one of them en-route to me as I write this, so as soon as I get my hands on it, I will let you know what it’s like.  I already have some pretty cool ideas for it in mind. I don’t know ...

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 ...

Mindsensors are about to bring out a new servo kit that allows you to control a standard LEGO pneumatic valve. It comes as a kit, complete with all the bits and pieces including: A small microservo Two Technic axels A few bushings and other small pieces A mounting kit for the servo A pneumatic valve Here are some pictures of ...

Give it up for my main man Andy Milluzzi who, with some help from John Hansen, created the world’s first NXT-G block that leverages the NXT’s RS485 communication abilities! Well done. What does that mean?  Well now you can connect two bricks, back-to-back with a cable connected between their S4 ports and communicate at a blinding 921600 bps!  That’s quite ...

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’ve received a fresh batch of sensor covers in the mail so I can once again show you the gory details of various NXT sensor innards. This time I took a knife to the HiTechnic Acceleration Sensor. I’ve been curious about this one for a little while now. From the pictures below it’s quite easy to see which one of ...

Using the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensor as an old fashioned NXT 1.0 Light Sensor as very simple in NXT-G but a little more involved in ROBOTC. The old Light Sensor uses a small red LED to illuminate the target and a small sensor to see how much was reflected. The new colour sensor can be used in a very similar ...