Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

Some pretty cool new ROBOTC features coming soon from the fine folks at Robotics Academy: Recursion and re-entrant function support Simple pointers I have no hard timeline on this stuff yet but I assume a new beta will appear soon with preliminary support for these features for those who dare!  I know I will be modifying my driver suite to ...

HiTechnic have released a new product; the HiTechnic Passive Infrared (PIR) sensor.  With this sensor you can detect movement of warm bodies, such as pets and people. How does it work?  All warm bodies, such as people and pets emit a certain amount of heat, which is Infrared radiation.  This particular sensor keeps track of changes in the amount of ...

Last Saturday, Laurens and I were asked to give a LEGO Mindstorms NXT demo at the Dutch Robocup Junior championships.  We had our table setup on the second deck, right along the path to the actual arena. There were plenty of robots there but one in particular caught my eye.  It was the Talentenclub’s Talentenbot.  It was the only one ...

I had promised to make another video this weekend of the new Mindsensors GlideWheel-M encoder sensor and behold, the result!  I took a pan & tilt rig I used for a previous project and modified it a bit.  You can see the result below. The Power Functions motors are so nice and quiet and had no issues turn the rig, ...

What is SNMP? When I got my NXT2WIFI sensor from Daniele I was quite sure what I wanted to make with it:  an SNMP agent.  What is an SNMP agent, you say?  SNMP, short for Simple Network Management Protocol, is a protocol that, as you may have guessed by now, a protocol that can be used for monitoring and configuring ...

The mailman brought me a cool new toy to play with this afternoon!  It’s the Mindsensors GlideWheel-M!  These are so cool, you can now use the Large XL Power Functions motor with the same degree of accuracy as an NXT motor.  The GlideWheel-M is just a single unit thick and fits very nicely onto the motor.  You can mount it ...

Mindsensors have been working on an IMU of their own.  It has a compass, and accelerometer, as well as a 3-axis gyro.  It can be used is available in two configurations: Accelerometer and Compass or Gyro Accelerometer and Compass and Gyro. Seems a bit strange to have to chose between these two configurations but I am sure there’s a reason for ...

Over on the Kinect Blog, they announced a new version of the Kinect SDK.  I haven’t really had much of a chance to play with it lately, mainly because my application needs to be completely rewritten when they moved from beta to 1.0.  This new version has some new simple examples, which would really help with learning the new framework. ...

This weekend I wanted to give the new ROBOTC for Arduino beta a go and what better platform to use than the ArduinoMega with the Mindsensors NXShield-M to interface with my Mindstorms hardware. My setup was simple: An NXT motor attached to Motor Port A1 An NXT Touch sensor attached to Sensor Port A1 An ArduinoMega with an NXShield-M A ...

When NoStarch Press contacted me a week or two so ago about doing a review about a book called “LEGO® Heavy Weapons”, I must admit I was a little skeptical.  I am not a big fan of guns or violence but when I saw a PDF preview of this book I was blown away (pardon the pun). The book is ...