Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

When I first heard this book was coming out a few months ago, I couldn’t wait for it to become available on Amazon.  Fate would have it be that last week I was contacted by No Starch Press to ask if I was interested in reviewing this book.  It took all of about 1 ms to make up my mind; of course ...

If you’re in the Netherlands and you want to see loads of cool robots and talk to their creators then come to the HCC Robotica Open Day event in Hooglanderveen this coming Saturday, 6 October.  I’m going to be taking some of my robots with me.  So if you want pop by and say “hi”, ask questions or just hang ...

It’s here, folks!  After what seems like an eternity, at least to me, I proudly present the first beta of the ROBOTC Driver Suite V3.0.  The reason it’s beta is because I have not had a chance to test all of the drivers.  I will continue to test more as I release new betas but I also count on you, ...

The ROBOTC development team have released a new version of ROBOTC 3.51 that addresses a number of issues that were present and reported by users in 3.50.  Below is a list of changes that were made: Change joystick button commands to return a short to avoid “int == bool” comparison warning. Incorrect calculation of “sizeof” operator for ‘call by reference’ ...

Since the release of ROBOTC 3.50, I’ve been working hard on porting my current Driver Suite to the new function prototypes that came along with the introduction of pointers. Apart from the obvious changes to make it compile under ROBOTC 3.50, I have also finally made the move to rename all the files and drivers to a more sensible naming ...

If to be able to sense the Force you want your robot, an excellent choice this HiTechnic Force Sensor is.  Hmmmmm. ..  Due to come out in early October, this little bad boy can measure the amount of force applied to an axle that presses into the axle receptacle (image below left), which you see in the front of the ...

Woot!  ROBOTC 3.5 is finally out!  Below is a copy of the original article, which you can find here: [LINK]. Please note that the Driver Suite has not been updated yet to work flawlessly with this new version.  I will update it in the coming weeks and add a whole slew of new drivers. The ROBOTC Development team is proud ...

Looking for an interesting challenge to hone your robot building skills?  Want to pit your skills against the rest of the World?  If so, then The Mindstorms Annual Online Competition might be just the thing for you. Here’s a run down taken from various pages on the official site: Rules All entries MUST be submitted before 25th December Up to ...

Mindsensors is about to release a cool new sensor with an array of 8 light detectors: the Light Sensor Array.  Sound familiar?  Well, it should.  This is quite similar to their LineLeader sensor, with one major difference; there is no built-in PID regulator.  Why?  Simple, some robotics competitions deemed the LineLeader so good as to be an unfair advantage over ...

HiTechnic told me they were working on this little gem a while back but it’s finally here!  The HiTechnic MiniScope!  This is so cool it’s not even funny!  It’s very small and can actually be plugged right into a bread board!  That’s very useful if you want to combine it with the HiTechnic SuperPro, of course.  Now you can see ...