Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

Today, my friends from DHL brought me some new toys!  Thanks to Yassine from Generation Robots for sending me these to play with: A pre-production model of the Wheelphone robot – a robot frame that can be connected to either an iPhone or an Android phone A Seeedstudio DSO Quad, a 4 channel digital storage oscilloscope The Wheelphone The Wheelphone ...

I’ve been working on a Robocup Junior soccer playing robot, based on the new upcoming MINDSTORMS EV3 system.  I just wanted to give you a sneak peek at what it looks like.  This is probably rebuild number 15 or so, as I’ve been working on this since before December last year.  I made an NXT version before then, so I ...

Some exciting things are happening with Dexter Industries.  Earlier this week they announced they’re working on a couple of mystery products.  Here they are, as they appear on the DI website. Mystery Project #1 This appears to be a Raspberry Pi with a custom shield on top of it that has NXT connectors.  It is hard to tell how many ...

Aligning your fruit ‘n veg If you’ve ever had to output anything on the screen in ROBOTC, you’ve probably used nxtDisplayTextLine() or one of its many siblings.  Your code may, or may not have looked something like this: task main() { int num_apples = 10; // how do you like them apples? int num_pears = 8; int num_cherries = 116; ...

The 3.3.1 release of the Driver Suite is hopefully the last of the 3.x series.  I’ve now started working on implementing a new architecture for Driver Suite 4.x.  Some things will change, some remain the same: Sensor related data is now kept in structs, so buffers will no longer be shared by similar sensors. Local variables will be removed or a ...

Dexter Industries have unleashed another sensor into the wild, the dLight.  I sort of ran my mouth a little, when I released my previous version of the Driver Suite by mentioning it then.  However, it’s out now and available from the Dexter Industries website. So what exactly is the dLight?  Other than a name that springs to mind many a ...

There’s a new release version of ROBOTC out now.  No longer just a beta, this one’s for real!  There are so many changes since the last release, 3.54, you’d have to be crazy not to update!  I’ve been testing the in-between releases like mad, 3.56, 359 and some builds in between.  They all seem to work fine with the Driver ...

Now that both HiTechnic and Mindsensors have a SensorMUX, it may be a good opportunity to highlight some of the differences between the two. The HiTechnic SensorMUX This one has been around for a few years now and is well liked with FTC teams everywhere.  It allows you hook up to four supported sensors, which are automatically polled by the ...

For about two weeks there was  a bit of a scare, while the FIRST folks were deciding whether or not my Driver Suite was actually legal to use in the FTC.  It had been used for years prior to someone actually asking the question.  Their initial reaction was “no”, but with a little coaxing from the people at Robomatter, they ...

Version 3.3 is out and should work just fine with all version of ROBOTC for NXT of at least 3.59.  I still need more testers for the dWiFI and NXT2WIFI sensors, so if you’re keen, let me know.  If you’re not keen, then, ehm, don’t. IMPORTANT NOTICE(S)! This suite will not work with anything less than ROBOTC 3.59, make sure ...