Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

Sometimes you build a robot and when you’re done you think: “What was I thinking?” This wasn’t one of those occasions. I built this robot with the sole purpose of looking really silly.  This is Ugly Duckling (UD).  It’s basically a LEGO body that sits on top of an aluminium frame.  The frame is the bottom half of a Parallax ...

Can you guess what this will be? To help you: the IC is an LM358 dual op-amp and there’s enough parts in the pictures to make 3 of the mystery object.  I will not give you any more hints, so don’t ask for them. You can mail me your best guess at mightor@gmail.com. If I manage to make this work, ...

So you bought an NXTCamV2 or V3 and as you read through the fine manual you were left scratching your head, wondering how those colour maps worked. The colour maps in the NXTCam are ranges of colours that it uses to track objects by matching them to what it’s seeing.  To configure them, you can use a nice utility, NXTCamView ...

Finally, after what seems to be half a lifetime and then some, ROBOTC has support for the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensor!  Yes, you read that right, you are not hallucinating! When digging through the header files, it seems the adjustable built-in motor ramping is also back.  Hurray!  The info below was taken from the original article: [LINK]. Bug Fixes: Preserve ...

BobBot Mk2 has learned a new trick: finding a can.  Finding cans makes BobBot very happy; he even chirps when he sees one and gets very loud when it’s about 10 cms away from one.  A lot of work still needs to be done: Approach towards can needs to be PID controlled for smooth steering instead of the waggle it ...

I am writing this tutorial in response to a Google Search query that landed someone on this blog.  Now I am pretty sure there isn’t one of those tutorials on my blog, so I am not sure what brought that person here.  To make sure the next person who lands here does get a satisfactory answer, I’ve put something up. ...

Programming the NXT is nice.  However, sometimes you run into limits that you think shouldn’t be there.  This morning I hit one of those and scratched my head: “How to fix this?”.  Normally there are 4 timers at your disposal in ROBOTC (this also goes for NXC, as far as I am aware of).  I am not sure why we ...

Meet BobBot Mk2, the intellectually challenged robot.  This subsumption based robot is probably the most challenging robot I’ve ever had to program.  It has quite a number of sensors: Mindsensors NXTCamV3 Mindsensors Magic Wand Mindsensors Dist-nx HiTechnic Sensor MUX HiTechnic EOPD LEGO Touch Sensor x 2 LEGO US Sensor Subsumption is not something I have an awful lot of experience ...

For the longest time I’ve been meaning to do something with the RAMTRON FM24V10 chips that I got as a sample some time last year. They’re I2C EEPROM drop-in replacements, meaning they are functionally and electrically identical to the standard ones we see everywhere.  Their main advantage over standard I2C EEPROM chips is that you don’t have the 5ms delay ...

A new release of the 3rd Party ROBOTC Driver Suite is out! Version 1.4 includes quite a number of changes and new drivers: Newly added drivers: Holit Data Systems Motor MUX Mindsensors Motor MUX Mindsensors Touch MUX Philips PCF8574 driver for Mindsensors Magic Wand and PCF8574 prototyping board HiTechnic IR Seeker 2 driver (HTIRS2), replaces HTDIR Lots of extra examples ...