Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

2 New Drivers There are two brand new drivers for the latest NXT sensors, the Mindstorms AbsoluteIMU and the HiTechnic Passive InfraRed (PIR) sensor.  The cool thing is that the HT PIR sensor will also work with the HiTechnic Sensor MUX (SMUX).  Only one thing, though, when you’re using with the SMUX, you will not be able to adjust the ...

After seemingly forever, ROBOTC 3.5 beta is finally out.  So why is this important?  There have been so many cool new features added to this release, it might as well be 4.0, to be honest. So what’s new?  Below is a list of some of the new features: Full ANSI-C support to support pointers, recursion, and stacks with an updated ...

It’s been a while since I last did an “exposed” article, where I take apart a sensor and take intimate pictures of its insides.  The HiTechnic Passive Infra Red (PIR) is a great one though.  It was also one of the most tricky ones to photograph and put back together.  To read more about what this sensor can do, check ...

I don’t usually write about stuff other than sensors and robots, but I’m going to have to make an exception this time. I’ve been using a great tool for the past few months now called Freemind.  It’s a Mind-mapping tool that allows you to quickly put down your ideas and visualise them and make connections between various sub-ideas.  As Wikipedia ...

Controlling your robot with a Playstation 2 remote is all well and good but what if you want to use something else?  No worries, with the new Mindsensors Playstation 2 controller interface, you can also get a model that can receive IR signals from a standard TV remote.  Sounds cool?  Well it is. When I released my Driver Suite yesterday ...

3 New Drivers I’ve added support for 2 new devices and a better driver for an older one.   The minimal version for the Driver Suite has been set to 3.08.  If you need support for an older version ROBOTC, I would advise you to stick with a previous version of the Suite. Please note that the drivers don’t seem to ...

There’s a new Hispabrick Magazine out! Another installment packed full of great articles, models and tutorials. Here’s a taste of what you’ll find: Lots and lots of droids (the ones you were looking for) How Kickstarter helped fund two very cool projects Another installment of the Mindstorms NXT programming tutorial The next chapter in the LDraw tutorial (part 13) Reviews ...

Simon Burfield, a.k.a. Burf has made a super cool model.  By model I mean chair and by chair I mean omnidirectional wheelchair. Oh and it’s life-sized, too.  Yeah, it is capable of handling no less than 90 kg!  I saw a video of an early prototype a few weeks ago but this new one is even better-er! Some facts: It ...

I’ll be releasing a new version of the driver Driver Suite soon.  I’ve changed the minimum version it will compile under to ROBOTC 3.08, the latest stable release.  I am using some very useful functionality in some of my drivers that didn’t appear in previous versions. #include "firmwareVersion.h" #if (kFirmwareVersion < 912) #error "These drivers are only supported on RobotC ...

I was posed a question earlier this week: given an arbitrary English text, how would you pick out the 10 most common words?  On the NXT,  having a pile of sensor readings is nice but what if you need to pick the top 10 smallest or biggest ones?  How would you go about doing that?  There are no intrinsic functions ...