Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

My bricks spend a lot of time not inside a construction of some kind since I spend most of my time developing software, rather than building. A couple of months ago I built a simple studded Lego construction to allow me to use two bricks at a tilt to allow easy reading and a way for me to keep the ...

As Martijn already reported on The NXT Step, the FLL Benelux finals were held in Arnhem, the Netherlands last Saturday.  Laurens, Martijn and I were there to demo Lego Mindstorms. Laurens had built a very cool segway robot that could be remote controlled.  I had built the new Wall Following robot from the HiTechnic website.  It uses the HT EOPD ...

After much deliberation between me, myself and I, we’ve picked 4 winners; they are: Pretzel (Tammy) Crud (Merijn) Asimov (Sidneys1) Untitled (NickNackGus) As they say in the gaming world, screenshots or it never happened, so here are pictures of the four bricks with their new names: Pretzel Untitled Crud   Asimov To everyone whose suggestions were not picked, thanks for ...

I have a problem.  It’s not life threatening, but important none the less.  I am need of no less than 4 names for my NXT bricks.  Do you think you could come up with a cool name that is no more than 8 characters long?  I will pick the 4 best one and you’ll have the dubious honour of having ...

The programming of the NXTCam-V3 has begun in earnest now. AndyM has set up the Source Forge project and the first couple of developers (including yours truly) have been added.  It’s been set up so that each developer has his/her own branch of the source code to play with.  This way we shouldn’t be able to get in each other’s ...

My new toy arrived this morning.  It’s a beta version of the Mindsensors NXTCam v3.  This one is able to be reprogrammed by the user via USB, so you can tweak the way it handles all the visual information before sending it to the NXT.  Rather than relying on the standard firmware, you can now create your own.  I have ...

After weeks of programming, I can finally say that the robot arm is done!  it moves quite  nicely, albeit a little slow. All in all, I am quite pleased with the final result.  The whole thing was programmed in ROBOTC 2.x. After a weekend of programming and fiddling, it has now become an integral part of the Lego High Bay ...

At the last Lego World in Zwolle, a very large High Bay Storage system was demoed.  Unfortunately, due to time constraints, certain parts of it hadn’t been completely finished yet.  I was lucky enough to be able to get involved with this amazing project and was given the responsibility of programming one of the many robots in it.   This ...

Merry Christmas to one and all!  I hope you have a great time with your family and friends.  May all your gifts be Lego! (Perhaps some socks as well, they’re always handy)

Mindsensors was kind of enough to send me one of their prototype sensors, the Power Meter, to play with.  It’s a sensor that allows you to measure, among other things, the current and voltage of anything you care to connect to it (within limits, of course).  The first thing that came to mind was building something that would log the ...