Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

As per request, here are the ideas of the winners.  I have copied and pasted (most of) the information from the original mails and edited it slightly. Benoît Genest: An omniwheeled container handler. In almost every Intermodal port, you can find Container Handlers (or Reachstacker) . These are usually 4- wheeled telehandlers featuring a specially adapted claw to handle containers ...

Man, this was really, really difficult.  There were some really good submissions but in the end there could only be three winners.  So without further ado, the people who will be receiving a set of these wheels are: Simon Burfield Benoît Genest Brian Bachmeier Congratulations to the three of you and I really hope you will share your inventions with me ...

Well, not really a gorilla, but a very uniquely coloured sensor from Dexter Industries which has been named after Snowflake, the albino gorilla, which you can see to your left, looking seductively at the camera. You can win a Dexter Industries dIMU, with a really cool white NXT socket, it’s a one of a kind, so make sure you enter!  ...

HiTechnic have started selling the Rotacaster wheels now as well.  That’s great news for people who live State-side.  Now you won’t have to worry about US customs intercepting your nice wheels and using them for something themselves. HiTechnic is selling them in packs of two and you can get right here: [LINK]. They plan to have cool models up on ...

Don’t forget that if you want to win 3 of those awesome Rotacaster wheels, you have only 10 days left to submit your idea to xander_at_botbench_dot_com (fix the address). You MUST put the words “ROTACASTER GIVE AWAY” in the subject. More details can be found here: [LINK].

It’s been a super exciting and busy week over at Dexter Industries! To celebrate the official release of their WiFi sensor, they published an article each day on some of the cool things you can do with this new sensor. Friday: Connecting The Wifi Sensor to a Network The first article is all about the basics of hooking up the ...

I was working on an omniwheeled robot last night, trying some code that would ensure the vehicle would go straight even if the motors were not perfectly in sync.  Unfortunately, there seemed to be a bit of a bug in the code which lead to some pretty erratic behaviour. So as you can see, not all of my projects are ...

Microsoft released a new version of the Kinect SDK a few days ago and I totally missed it!  They have also made a really nice site for it, too.  You can check it out here: [LINK]. Some of the new things in this version of the SDK include: Faster  and Improved Skeletal Tracking With updates to the multi-core exemplar, Kinect ...

Today I’ve been quite busy programming a more generic framework for using buttons, strings and multiple windows on the NXT.  Things like button pressing is now handled centrally, as well as rendering the windows and the buttons in their current state.  It’s starting to take shape now and it’s not looking too badly.   The buttons respond to presses anywhere ...

I thought it would be kind of fun to modify some of my program to make use of the Mindsensors TouchPanel sensor.  Having buttons on the screen would make it a lot more intuitive to use.  So here’s a first short video of a 3D button that you can press with the TouchPanel using a stylus.  It’s not much yet, ...