Sensors

So you just bought yourself one of the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensors and you’re keen to get started with it. You browse through the example programs that are shipped with ROBOTC and open the “ColorSensor.c” program. “300 lines of code to read a simple colour?” you ask yourself. Fear not, it’s a lot easier than that. In order to use ...

So I’ve had these Dexter Industries NXTBees for about two weeks now and I’ve been working hard to come up with something cool.  Even before I received these NXTBees I spoke with John from DI about sending telemetry data from one NXT to another over a distance using these sensors. One of the potentially biggest data volume generating sensors I ...

Dexter Industries have released their latest creation, the NXTBee, into the wild. I’ve had the pleasure of being able to play with two of these for a little while now and they’re awesome. I am currently working on a robust master/slave protocol but the NXTBee is capable of much more. You can communicate between up to 16 nodes in total, ...

As mentioned on the Lego-X blog, Mindsensors have some pretty cool things for us in store in the next coming months. I spoke with Deepak from Mindsensors a few days ago about some of the things they are working on in their lab and it’s pretty exciting stuff. A dual relay controller, rated at 30V and 13Amps. That’s a LOT ...

Just uploaded a quick video of the initial test done with the Dexter Industries NXTBee. It’s the same program Dexter Industries used in their flag waving video. It’s really cool to have the wireless connection without all the stupid hoops you have to jump through to do a bidirectional connection in BT. Much more to come soon; I have a ...

After a long wait, thanks to the speediness of the USPS (their delivery status page is beyond useless), my two Dexter Industries NXTBee sensors finally arrived!  These little puppies will allow me to communicate between up to 16 NXTs at about 115Kb/s.  Pretty sweet, I’d say.  They leverage the NXT’s underutilised port 4’s ability to talk RS485 to achieve these ...

Sometimes even the greatest leaders need a little help.  This is also true of the Mindsensors LineLeader sensor. I’ve been working on maze solving robot and noticed that the robot’s state engine would sometimes be triggered by transient readings from the sensor. It would suddenly think that a crossing was detected and swerve to the right or left. Rather than ...

Dexter Industries hasn’t been sitting still in the past few weeks; they’ve been busy developing a very cool new sensor. It’s an NXT sensor that leverages the XBee as a means of communication. No longer will you be limited to slow, one-way Bluetooth connections between just your master and 3 slaves.  With XBee you have can have up to 16 ...

A new release of the Driver Suite has been uploaded to Source Forge. Changes: common.h: added check for sensor type for all I2C calls.  To disable this check, please refer to the source code. Dexter Industries dGPS: added missing DGPSreadDistToDestination() function HT Angle Sensor: added Sensor MUX support HT Compass: enhanced HTMCreadRelativeHeading() function Lego US: Added lots of new functions: ...

This is Apollo, the smallest NXT based line follower I’ve ever made.  It’s loosely based on A-Maze-Ing, which I designed and built quite a while ago. Apollo is equipped some pretty cool stuff: The new Mindsensors Numpad A Mindsensors LineLeader sensor Two Rotacaster wheels The program in this robot is based on the same one I wrote for the Mean ...