Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

Sometimes even the greatest leaders need a little help.  This is also true of the Mindsensors LineLeader sensor. I’ve been working on maze solving robot and noticed that the robot’s state engine would sometimes be triggered by transient readings from the sensor. It would suddenly think that a crossing was detected and swerve to the right or left. Rather than ...

Dexter Industries hasn’t been sitting still in the past few weeks; they’ve been busy developing a very cool new sensor. It’s an NXT sensor that leverages the XBee as a means of communication. No longer will you be limited to slow, one-way Bluetooth connections between just your master and 3 slaves.  With XBee you have can have up to 16 ...

I made some updates to the line following program for the Rotacaster One-Kit Omniwheel robot.  This version 2.0 allows you to adjust the Gain and Power variables by turning the back wheels back and forth.  When you’re happy with the values, you can hit one of the bumpers and it’ll start the auto-calibration routine and attempt to follow the course ...

Holit Data Systems has kindly provided Russian translations of my most recent articles on their website.  Go check it out! Мое судно на воздушной подушке полно угрей!

I pulled this off my stats page this afternoon!  Wow, I would never have thought I’d get this many people coming to my blog when I first started it back in June 2008.  It’s cool to see that the work I put into this blog isn’t just for a small handful of people.  Here’s a screenshot of the top 10 ...

A new release of the Driver Suite has been uploaded to Source Forge. Changes: common.h: added check for sensor type for all I2C calls.  To disable this check, please refer to the source code. Dexter Industries dGPS: added missing DGPSreadDistToDestination() function HT Angle Sensor: added Sensor MUX support HT Compass: enhanced HTMCreadRelativeHeading() function Lego US: Added lots of new functions: ...

These two packages arrived about 1.5 weeks ago, courtesy of the Robotics Academy as a thank you for some of the things I’ve done for them over the past few years.  You can’t even imagine how amazingly grateful I was! This is a complete VEX Cortex Super Bundle, that sells for about $1300 US, wow! There is so much stuff ...

Among all of the cool presents I got for Christmas this year were two new shields for my Arduino. I got a L298N Shield and a DFRobot LCD Keypad Shield. I wanted some new shields so I could write drivers for the Arduino port of ROBOTC. I found the original C++ driver for the LCD shield and quickly ported it ...

I’d like to wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year or if they’re celebrating something else to have fun doing that.  If tomorrow is “Wet Noodle Slapping Day” in your part of the world then I wish much happiness celebrating that. May 2011 bring you all the happiness you deserve, good health and perhaps ...

I’m on TV! Well, kind of.  I did a video podcast interview last weekend for Joey, also known as Jojoguy10 who runs the Lego-X website. It was kind of daunting to do the interview and actually and even more difficult to watch now. I am not a big fan of my hearing my own voice, which is hard to imagine ...