Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

If you haven’t heard of the OHM2013 event then you’ve probably been living under a bit of a rock.  It’s a truly massive hacking event in the Netherlands that takes place every 4 years (albeit under a different name each time).  This year is extra special because Steven Canvin, the former manager of the MINDSTORMS robotics community, will be there ...

You can now access the ROBOTC forums via the Tapatalk application on your mobile device.  It’s very cool and works like a charm.  I just configured it on my HTC Sensation and it looks great. It’s easy to set up, just download the app via the site above, which will redirect you to either the Windows Phone, Apple or the ...

When Melanie Steiner contacted me some time ago with a question about using joystick control in combination with the Mindsensors NXTServo controller, I got curious. What was she making?  It turned out she is one of the members of a small group of students in Switzerland who were taking part in a contest.  The task was to make a system ...

This is essentially just a maintenance release with a couple of important changes.  The Changelog is small but the fixes are great (taken from the original article): NEW Joystick Configuration Utility – Added compatibility for custom joystick configurations; the Joystick Configuration Utility can now be used to configure a wide variety of controllers for use with ROBOTC. Read about it ...

I wrote about mind maps a while back in an article titled “Freemind: Untangle your Brain”.  Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by Michael Tipper, who runs the site MindmappingShow.com.  For the second episode of his show, “Using Mind Mapping To Create Simplicity Out of Complexity”, he asked me how I used mind maps and how they’ve made a difference in how I ...

I’ve started putting some of my code that I’m working on GitHub.  You can now access my repositories here: [LINK]. The first on there is my Robot Virtual Worlds Maze Crawler.  If you don’t have Git, don’t worry, you can also just download the whole thing as a zip file. Other repositories will appear on there as well at some ...

I couldn’t believe my eyes this morning when I saw that Botbench had reached 400,000 views! Some other stats: On the busiest day (8 Jan 2013) I had almost 3000 views.  This was mainly caused by the announcement of the EV3. I’ve written 412 posts in total. About a quarter of views come in via search engines. 19% of all ...

A quick tour of my new and improved LEGO Lair with nice storage system and large desk space.  This is where I do my thing, where I write my drivers and build my robots.  I even tidied it up a bit before I took the video.

It’s finally finished and ready to be published, my Robot Virtual Worlds Maze Crawler is fully functional.  Check out the screenshot below. The engine for this robot consists of two Finite State Machines (FSM) that handle the cruising around, turning, scanning, etc.  Here’s a little video of it, doing its thing. Main FSM The main state machine consists of 5 ...

BotBench can now also be found on Tumblr! It won’t replace this blog, but it’s a good place for me to put small titbits of news out there that would otherwise just clog up this main site.  I’m busy working on the appearance of it, so it’s likely to change over the next few days. This site will continue to ...