Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

Give it up for my main man Andy Milluzzi who, with some help from John Hansen, created the world’s first NXT-G block that leverages the NXT’s RS485 communication abilities! Well done. What does that mean?  Well now you can connect two bricks, back-to-back with a cable connected between their S4 ports and communicate at a blinding 921600 bps!  That’s quite ...

After spending two hours working on the changelog for the upcoming release of my driver suite, I thought I’d go play with something that was a bit more fun. I’m part of the ROBOTC for Arduino test group, which has been a lot of fun. The Arduino build does not have I2C support in the firmware yet, so I was ...

I’ve received a fresh batch of sensor covers in the mail so I can once again show you the gory details of various NXT sensor innards. This time I took a knife to the HiTechnic Acceleration Sensor. I’ve been curious about this one for a little while now. From the pictures below it’s quite easy to see which one of ...

Using the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensor as an old fashioned NXT 1.0 Light Sensor as very simple in NXT-G but a little more involved in ROBOTC. The old Light Sensor uses a small red LED to illuminate the target and a small sensor to see how much was reflected. The new colour sensor can be used in a very similar ...

So you just bought yourself one of the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensors and you’re keen to get started with it. You browse through the example programs that are shipped with ROBOTC and open the “ColorSensor.c” program. “300 lines of code to read a simple colour?” you ask yourself. Fear not, it’s a lot easier than that. In order to use ...

So I’ve had these Dexter Industries NXTBees for about two weeks now and I’ve been working hard to come up with something cool.  Even before I received these NXTBees I spoke with John from DI about sending telemetry data from one NXT to another over a distance using these sensors. One of the potentially biggest data volume generating sensors I ...

The site for the Robot Virtual World (RVW) which I wrote about last week is now online.   Not all the content is there yet, the missions still have to be created but it’s a fun website and I’m sure lots of great things will continue to pop up on it.  So go check it out: [LINK].

Dexter Industries have released their latest creation, the NXTBee, into the wild. I’ve had the pleasure of being able to play with two of these for a little while now and they’re awesome. I am currently working on a robust master/slave protocol but the NXTBee is capable of much more. You can communicate between up to 16 nodes in total, ...

The fine folks at the Robotics Academy have released a new version of ROBOTC for the Cortex and PIC.  There are quite a number of changes: Updated new Master Firmware for VEX Cortex Fixed “Cannot find firmware file” download error. Additional Integrity Checks on Firmware Downloading & qualifiers are now accepted on structure elements. Improved robustness for communicating with Cortex ...

Original article here: [LINK]. Carnegie Mellon will release a fully working, downloadable “Technical Demonstration” of their new Robot Virtual World (RVW) programming tool to the world on February 9, 2011. The first world takes students to planet H99 where they will be able to program their robots using feedback from encoders, sonar, and compass sensors. The RVW project is designed ...