Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

To the left are the fruits of about an hour’s worth of hack-sawing, soldering and hot gluing.  If you can’t see from the pictures what it is, let me explain.  It’s one of the Mindsensors NXT connectors attached to a cut-to-size prototype copper strip board.  It’s not the prettiest thing in the world but it works.  I hot glued a ...

The Mindsensors PCF8574A board is not just suitable for making das Blinkenlights but also for controlling other ICs.  I recently thought of how I could use my old 9V motors with my NXT using a dual H-Bridge IC such as the SN754410.  This IC is pin compatible with the very popular L293D and has the same clamping diodes built-in.  It ...

About a week ago I ordered some product samples from Maxim.  I am not talking about the men’s magazine but the IC manufacturer.  Well, they got here yesterday so that’s pretty damned quick if you ask me.  I was keen to get some hard to obtain ICs for my robot projects.  I ordered 3 MAX127 12 bit 4 Channel ADCs, ...

The Mindstorms NXT is great, no doubt.  However, sometimes you’d like to be able connect non-Lego items to it.  The NXT’s ability to talk I2C, the industry standard protocol for interfacing electronic devices makes this an easy to achieve goal.  Since this was my first time hooking up anything non-Lego to my NXT, you can imagine my hesitation.  I procured ...

Next Saturday (21 July 2008 ) I am giving a presentation on the Parallax Propeller microcontroller and I thought it would be a nice idea to demo some things with it.  I have a Propeller Education Kit (PEK) and a Propeller Proto Board (PPB), kindly donated to me by Parallax.  The PEK is awesome for learning how to use the ...

I’m trying to sort out this blog and how it looks, so appearances may change over the next few days as I modify, tweak and rip bits out, only to replace them or re-add them 5 minutes later. Stay tuned.

My current project, well, the one I seem to be spending the most time on is a robot called A-Maze-Ing. It is based on a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick. This robot is, or rather, will be, a line-maze solving robot. The first challenge in building this robot was its size. Rules dictate the robot should not exceed 15x15x15 cm at ...

It seems it’s been years since I last blogged anything.  I used to run a blog at mightor.blogspot.com but I guess I ran out of ideas to post about.  This blog’s title is a good summation of what I think about when I am at work or doing something I’m not really enjoying. I’ve been building robots for a little ...