Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

I was incensed when I read that a student by the name of Landon Woollard from Shasta High School in Redding, CA was the first student to get his ROBOTC certification.  First of all, I had no idea this certification even existed,l nobody told me! Imagine that.  Now, second of all, I didn’t even receive an honourary certification in lieu ...

With ROBOTC 3.59 came two new sensor types, the sensorCustom and the complimentary sensorCustom9V.  This sensor type was introduced to allow the fast toggling of the dig0 and dig1 lines on the NXT’s sensor ports.  Normally, these pins are either used for RS485, I2C or controlling the light on a LEGO Light Sensor.  Up until now, you could not control ...

Mindsensors are about to release a Sensor MUX of their own!  This one works very differently in that instead of doing the polling of the attached sensors for you, it allows itself to become a channel to said sensor.  So, in essence, you send it a command, like “give me access to the sensor attached to channel 1” and then, ...

The fine folks at Robomattter have released a new beta.  Now, I don’t think it should be called a beta, but I’m sure they have their reasons for that.  It fixes quite a number of issues that were reported in 3.54 and 3.55.2.  Thankfully, most, if not all of those bugs have been resolved.  This is a very stable build, ...

Hot off the virtual press, one of Mindboards’ most technical users, tcwan (real name Tat-Chee Wan), has published an e-book called “Fully ARMed NXT”.  The book is a highly technical book, which will teach you all the ins and outs of programming ARM assembler, using NXOS.  NXOS is an open source real time OS for the NXT. At almost 300 ...

I really love data structures.  That sounded a lot less geeky in my head, but it’s true.  It was my favourite subject when studying computer science and I have a few good books on the subject.  I don’t pretend to understand the math behind most of them.  In any case, when ROBOTC implemented pointers, I started working on a little ...

LEGO has created a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) about the EV3 Retail set.  It includes a side-by-side comparison of the NXT and EV3.  Keep in mind that it’s a bit market-y (they’re a little selective about the things they compare),  but it’s informative none the less. Just point your browser here: [LINK]. I am looking forward to when ...

Stacks are used a LOT in computing.  The CPU in your laptop or PC, your mobile phone and iPad all have one thing in common, they all use stacks, without exception.  So what is a stack you ask yourself?  Well, think of what a stack of things is in real life: a pile of items that you can only add ...

Hurray, ROBOTC has support for pointers!  “That’s nice,” I hear you say, “but what are they?”  That’s a good question.  I’ll try to explain in this tutorial.  This tutorial is the first of a couple that will show you the kinds of things you’ll be able to do with pointers. Standard varables Up until now, ROBOTC only supported normal variables; ...

Some very cool videos made by Vas (NeXTSTORM) have appeared on YouTube.  You’ll love these!  These are some of the MINDSTORMS EV3 retail set robots.