Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

I received my copy of John Hansen’s “Power Programming – Robotics in C”, second edition, a few weeks ago and I’ve read the whole thing. It’s a big book, a little over 540 pages, so it took me some time.  One of the coolest thing I like about this book is that almost all of the models can be built ...

A new version (1.2) of the ROBOTC driver suite awaits your download from the usual source. Lots of internal changes in this version.  I’ve been working on removing all the work-arounds that were necessary for ROBOTC pre-2.0 when there was no unsigned byte type.  Only ROBOTC 2.00 or higher is supported by this version.  The upgrade is free, so there ...

For this Christmas I bought the Winter Toy Shop (10199).  It’s the first Christmas decoration that I picked out for the house myself.  Usually Tammy does all the picking and choosing of all the things in the house (and what a fine job she does, too).  Our place looks like it could be Santa’s house, I kid you not!  After ...

The HiTechnic Sensor Multiplexer (SMUX) is a complex sensor that requires a fair amount of intimate knowledge of its operation in order to use it.  The tutorial has both ROBOTC and NXC examples.  Please note that error checking for all the I2C calls is outside the scope of this tutorial.  This was done so as to not clutter the code ...

On my continuing mission to take apart HiTechnic sensors and show you guys their guts, I present to you: The Gyro.  The little yellow/gold component on the right of the PCB is the actual gyro chip, the rest of the components most likely to deal with power conditioning.  There’s not a whole lot to tell about this board since there’s ...

For Lego World 2009 in the Netherlands I wanted to make a remote controlled version of the Crane Truck (8258).  It seemed pretty easy, after all, it’s a pretty big truck, right?  Well, I had underestimated the amount of space the gears and all the bevels take up.  In addition to the 4 powered functions in the original model, I ...

ROBOTC 2.0 is out!  After many months of development, testing and bug fixing, the folks at Robotics Academy have given birth to a 27MB baby.  This latest release is a major improvement over ROBOTC 1.x.  I was lucky enough to be part of the debugging and testing of the internal builds as Dick and Tim hacked away to squash the ...

For the Lego World 2009 in the Netherlands I built an omniwheeled robot.  It’s been done thousands of times before and the Internet is full of great (and not so great) examples.  I wondered why I hadn’t jumped on that bandwagon so I got cracking.  This was the first prototype I made back in August.  I was on a Lego ...

Note: this is a revised version of the original.  There was a problem with the way the response was put in the array that held the original message sent to the sensor.  That wouldn’t be a problem if I hadn’t setup my code to retransmit that message over and over without setting it up each time.  The response would corrupt ...

Taken from XKCD.