Tutorials

(Almost) everything you wanted to know about arrays in ROBOTC but were afraid to ask.  RoboDesigners have written up a quick explanation of how arrays work and help you visualise them.  It has some ROBOTC specific code in it, but would probably work fine for most programming languages. Thanks for taking the time to write it up!

Laurens, over at Robot Square, has written an easy to follow Bluetooth tutorial for ROBOTC.  So if you’re keen to do some remote controlling or other message passing but you’re not quite sure how to get started, then head on over: [LINK]. Turns out, it’s not nearly as hard as you might think!

To get started with your brand new copy of ROBOTC 3.x, there are a few steps you need to take. Download and install ROBOTC 3.x It is recommended you uninstall any and all previous versions of ROBOTC before you start with this. Make sure you downloaded and installed at LEAST version 3.02 of ROBOTC.  If you don’t have this, then ...

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 ...

So you bought an NXTCamV2 or V3 and as you read through the fine manual you were left scratching your head, wondering how those colour maps worked. The colour maps in the NXTCam are ranges of colours that it uses to track objects by matching them to what it’s seeing.  To configure them, you can use a nice utility, NXTCamView ...

I am writing this tutorial in response to a Google Search query that landed someone on this blog.  Now I am pretty sure there isn’t one of those tutorials on my blog, so I am not sure what brought that person here.  To make sure the next person who lands here does get a satisfactory answer, I’ve put something up. ...

The HiTechnic Sensor Multiplexer (SMUX) is a complex sensor that requires a fair amount of intimate knowledge of its operation in order to use it.  The tutorial has both ROBOTC and NXC examples.  Please note that error checking for all the I2C calls is outside the scope of this tutorial.  This was done so as to not clutter the code ...

Note: this is a revised version of the original.  There was a problem with the way the response was put in the array that held the original message sent to the sensor.  That wouldn’t be a problem if I hadn’t setup my code to retransmit that message over and over without setting it up each time.  The response would corrupt ...

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 ...

“Subsumption?” I hear you say, “What’s that?”  Subsumption is a form of behaviour based robotics where multiple behaviours can control a robot using a hierarchical system.  However, don’t take my word for it!  Check out Thom Roach’s great new blog.  He’s written some really ace articles on the subject without reverting to dry stuffy theory like you see in most ...