Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

If you receive a mail like the following below, don’t panic, it’s not a phishing expedition by some ruthless hacker.  You’re seeing the fruits of the hard labour that Sebastian Trella has done to resurrect the Mindboards forums.  Please spread the news on your blog, if you have one. Dear mindboards.net forum member: The MindBOARDS forums have finally been moved ...

Deepak from Mindsensors told me they have a new device coming out soon: a Sensor MUX for the NXT and EV3. What makes this one different from the MUXes out there?  Well for one, it’s very compact, only 42 mm x 48 mm, with mounting holes in a 4 x 5 studs square.  Other features include: Support for all EV3 sensors (UART ...

As of 1 December 2014, I will be become part of the Robomatter team.  It’s quite a radical change from my current day job as an IT Infrastructure Architect at CGI.  It will also mean relocating from the Netherlands to Pittsburgh, USA, home of Carnegie Mellon University and The Penguins. (Let’s Go Pens!) I’ve been involved in one way or another ...

If you’re keen to do ANSI C programming on your EV3 but are not a big fan of using Emacs, Eclipse or vi, then this may just be the thing for you.  It’s a .Net based IDE, running on Windows, that uses the standard gcc toolkit for the EV3’s ARM9 chip.  It’s simply called EV3_IDE.  The nice thing about it ...

I’ve always wanted to make a ROBOTC version of Conway’s famous Game of Life. It was first thought of back in 1940, so it’s a real piece of computer science history.  The Game of Life has very simple rules: (taken from WikiPedia) The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of ...

OpenElectrons has created another Kickstarter Project: the nuFlip.  What’s that, you ask?  It’s a Bluetooth controlled light switch adapter that you can mount on existing North American style light switches.  There’s no need for complicated electrical reworking, it simply sits on top of your existing switches! Here’s a list of some of its features: Flip switch On/Off from smartphone Configure ...

The HelloSpoon project, which I wrote about the other day now has a live campaign on Indiegogo.  This great project has the potential to change every day life for many with motor issues. Go check out out the campaign page, become a contributor and make this project a reality!

Great ideas that can improve people’s lives don’t necessarily need to come from big research labs.  The HelloSpoon project is a great example of a project that can help improve people’s lives. What is it? It’s a robotic arm that can spoon feed the infirm, sick or elderly without needing help.  Rather than having to depend on another person, the ...

My little brother dropped by last weekend, while on his journey through Europe by bike.  So, what’s more fun than playing with robots when it’s raining cats and dogs outside? That’s right, adding cameras to the robots!  I didn’t get any pictures of the robot with the camera on it, but you can see where it was held by the ...

It’s out!  ROBOTC 4.26 has been released.  You can read all about it here: [LINK].   It has a lot of changes, so be sure to check the complete Changelog.  Now that it’s out, I can focus on finishing up the ROBOTC Driver Suite, which still needs quite a bit of work for the EV3.  No rest for the wicked!