Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

Yesterday, Martijn Boogaarts and I held a Mindstorms NXT workshop at the one of the offices of Sioux, a software development company. We had a room full of eager software engineers and their offspring. Martijn did the general presentation and an introduction to NXT-G.  I took care of the ROBOTC presentation and quick intro. There were plenty of NXT sets ...

As mentioned on the Lego-X blog, Mindsensors have some pretty cool things for us in store in the next coming months. I spoke with Deepak from Mindsensors a few days ago about some of the things they are working on in their lab and it’s pretty exciting stuff. A dual relay controller, rated at 30V and 13Amps. That’s a LOT ...

Just uploaded a quick video of the initial test done with the Dexter Industries NXTBee. It’s the same program Dexter Industries used in their flag waving video. It’s really cool to have the wireless connection without all the stupid hoops you have to jump through to do a bidirectional connection in BT. Much more to come soon; I have a ...

After a long wait, thanks to the speediness of the USPS (their delivery status page is beyond useless), my two Dexter Industries NXTBee sensors finally arrived!  These little puppies will allow me to communicate between up to 16 NXTs at about 115Kb/s.  Pretty sweet, I’d say.  They leverage the NXT’s underutilised port 4’s ability to talk RS485 to achieve these ...

There’s a very nice robotics group called Robot MC that I’ve been frequenting for the past couple of years. They gather roughly every 3rd Saturday of the month in a very small town in Belgium called Sint-Katelijne-Waver. It’s not so much a club as a group of people with similar interests. There’s no real hierarchy, no general meetings, membership fees; ...

I’ve been hacking away at all of the drivers, making them meaner, leaner and easier to use. To go back to the HTAC (HiTechnic Accelerator Sensor) driver as an example, check this out:   HTAC-test1.c (in suite v 1.8.1) HTAC-test1.c (1st round) HTAC-test1.c (now) Total code bytes 4598 1643 (-64%) 1,387 (-70%) Memory locations 716 420 (-41%) 200 (-72%) Procedures ...

Over on the HiTechnic blog, Gus has written up a new article about his new NXT-G sin/cos and atan2 blocks. It’s chockfull of explanations and some examples. For the speed freaks among us, you’ll be happy to know that the integer variant takes about 0.5ms to do a calculation and the floating point version takes approximately 0.75ms.  That’s pretty fast, ...

If there are certain features you would like to have added to the 2.0 version of the suite, you can leave a comment at the end of this post.  If it’s something that will be of use to others as well than I will consider implementing it.  Now is a good chance to change parts of the API because I ...

I am currently working on rewriting the driver suite to make them leaner.  They won’t be backwards compatible with the old ones. Some of the changes will include: HiTechnic Sensor MUX support separated out from common.h.  If you want to use it, you will need to include a a file for it.  All subsequently included driver files will automatically have ...

Thanks to the hard work of Gus Jansson of HiTechnic, you can now do sin, cos and atan2, all from the comfort of your NXT-G programming environment!  How cool is that? Just go to this page and scroll to the bottom.  There are integer versions for NXT-G 1.0 and floating point ones for NXT-G 2.0. They’re proper NXT-G blocks and ...