Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

After the initial post about my thermal imaging system using the Dexter Industries Thermal Infrared Sensor, I made some improvements with both the speed and accuracy of the whole thing. I made the sensor sampling interval time based, rather than encoder value based.  This proved to be a lot better at getting consistent sampling rates.  I also doubled the horizontal ...

I may not be much of an NXT-G programmer but I can spot a good thing when I see it.  Gus over at HiTechnic has been a very busy man. Last time he brought us the really awesome PID motor block but this time he went the extra mile and made no less than three new blocks: A new IR ...

Having spent most of yesterday hacking and optimizing the firmware for the new Dexter Industries Thermal IR Sensor, I thought I would go ahead and make something fun with it today. I built a pan and tilt rig for the sensor with a great deal of gearing down to allow me to take a lot of measurements as the rig ...

Hey baby, you’re on fire!  No really, you are, I can tell with my new Thermal Infrared Sensor from Dexter Industries. This sensor came in the mail today, it’s Dexter Industries’ latest sensor, the Thermal Infrared Sensor. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but I have some great ideas in mind.  All will be revealed shortly! ...

Sidneys1 has come up with an improved version of my own Disco Inferno, written in NXC. His article has a great explanation of what PWM is and how it works. So if you’re keen to know the finer details about how RS485 can be used to control the brightness of a light or a motor, go check it out: [LINK].  ...

Sometimes an idea comes into existence and you wonder why the heck nobody else came up with it. My good friend Laurens Valk was working on a robot for one of his classes and asked me if there was a way to PWM the pins on the sensor port, dig0 and dig1. He needed to control a non-NXT motor without ...

Today, the first guests for the FIRST LEGO League Open European Championships start pouring into Delft, the Netherlands. The competition starts on Friday and ends Saturday. A whole bunch of MCPs (myself included) and quite a number of people from LEGO will be manning the LEGO Mindstorms stand to show off our robots and Monster Chess. Join the FLL OEC ...

No rest for the wicked, although they have been taking it a bit easier. In any case, I present my latest creation: version 2.0 beta 2 of the Driver Suite. Not as many changes as for beta 1, as you’d expect. Highlights for this version include: I changed the min, max and clip functions to macros and renamed them to ...

  Laurens Valk and I did a Mindstorms NXT demo yesterday at the Dutch Robocup Jr Finals at the science museum Nemo in Amsterdam. I made a short video of our booth featuring our robots. We had a couple of moving robots: Laurens’ front wheel drive jeep line follower from The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Inventor’s Guide 2 Segways ...

I’ve wanted one of these sensors since the day I first saw it on the Hacked Gadgets website. It’s the Microinfinity CruizCore XG1300L. It’s a ridiculously accurate and low drift inertial measurement unit, or IMU. Some of the features include: Measures rotational speed and angle Measures tilt and acceleration Can track relative position Detects contact from any direction (I wish ...