Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

It’s been a bit quiet here.  Mind you, this isn’t because I’ve been slacking.  Far from it, in fact.  I’ve been working on a new version of the driver suite with a number of new drivers and some other assorted goodies.  Some new devices that will be supported by the next version are: Mindsensors Motor MUX (no product page yet) ...

When you have a robot with a lot of bumper sensors, it is easy to run out of sensor ports.  Using the new Mindsensors TouchMUX this is no longer an issue.  You can connect up to 3 LEGO touch sensors to this device and with the help of a built-in small resistor network, you can easily tell which combination of touch ...

Mike Barnkob posted a really nice project on the ROBOTC forums;  a liquid handling robot.  I am sure you’ve seen them on most CSI shows; not like this one, however.  As you can see from the picture, it’s a fairly large contraption.  For additional coolness, he made use of the Firgelli Linear Actuators. The motors are controlled by using two NXTs ...

Gus Jansson of HiTechnic has written a nice article on how to use the HiTechnic EOPD sensor as a distance measuring sensor.  Ever wanted to know why the response of the EOPD is not linear? Gus does a great job of explaining it and how to calibrate your EOPD to give you maximum accuracy. Go check it out: [LINK].

Mindsensors are very busy working on their latest sensor, the Motor Multiplexer, also known as the NXTMMX. This compact MUX can control up to two motors and allows you to daisy chain up to 5 of these.  All of the bugs have been ironed out and I’m grateful to Mindsensors for having implemented some of my requested features.  The first ...

No big announcement from the LEGO side, but it seems that the source code for the 1.29 firmware is now available at the LEGO website.  You can download it right here: [LINK].  As per usual, the naming standard of LEGO’s downloadable files will make identifying the file super easy. In order to compile this, you will need a copy of ...

This NXC driver for the HiTechnic Sensor MUX has SMUX-equivalents of all the standard NXC functions for the supported sensors.  For example, to read the HiTechnic Colour Sensor without the SMUX, you’d use ReadSensorHTColor().  The SMUX version is called smuxReadSensorHTColor() and has pretty much the same arguments. I’ve also added some Doxygen-generated documentation to go with it and two examples, ...

Copied from The Robotics Academy: ROBOTC 2.0.2 is available for both NXT and VEX versions. Go here for the links: Download ROBOTC for NXT |   Download ROBOTC for VEX NEW FEATURE: Deactivate Licenses! See image below on how to deactivate a license. Changelog for ROBOTC for Mindstorms 2.0.2: ROBOTC for MINDSTORMS 2.0.2 is a maintenance release for bug fixes and ...

The state of my desk pretty much represents what I am currently working on: In the middle is the Holit Data Systems motor-MUX.  That’s the big sensor with the 5 ports and the bright LEDs on it.  I am writing a ROBOTC driver for it. Just below that is the HiTechnic sensor-MUX, I’ve written an NXC driver for it that ...

I don’t usually write about non-NXT related robots and I am not even sure if this really is a robot in the strict sense of the word.  However, when I ran into it on this website here: [LINK], I simply had to share it with you.  Prepare for a serious dose of “WTF?”.     There are more pictures in ...