Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

What is VEX IQ VEX IQ is the latest offering from VEX. It’s a complete modular robotics system to complement their VEX Cortex range.  The VEX IQ is positioned at a younger audience, from the age of about 8.  It uses plastic parts instead of the Cortex metal parts. Using pins, plates and connector pieces, it is easy to build ...

A little while ago I was asked to write a robotics article for the British Design & Technology Practice magazine.  I chose to cover the basics of programming a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT omniwheel based platform, and the mathematics behind it.  ROBOTC is used as the programming language, but I am sure the principles apply to other programming environments, too.  Although, I ...

Mirobot is a very cool open source robotics kit that’s completely open source and very affordable.  When I was contacted by Ben Pirt, the man behind this project, I was admittedly a little skeptical about yet another robotics system.  However, this robotics kit seems very nice and sports some very cool features: Super easy to build, it takes just two ...

The firmware used by National Instruments and Robomatter for their respective programming environments has been pushed to Github.  It is based on the sources of LEGO’s firmware version 1.05A.  Please note that only the master branch has been pushed out, the private development branches will remain as such. The extended firmware sports a number of improvements, including: opcodes to turn ...

It’s here!  The first beta of ROBOTC for EV3 has arrived! It took a bit longer than we’d hoped for but the wait is over.  You can now program your EV3 with ROBOTC.  This is the first public beta and as with all betas, there will be some missing features and bugs.  The basic functionality is mostly all there: General ...

There has been an enormous amount of progress in the past few weeks on the ROBOTC for EV3.  Many bugs and issues were fixed in the base LEGO VM that were causing issues, such as failed auto-id and I2C transactions. Pretty soon I can start working on porting the Driver Suite to the EV3.  Some things like I2C will be ...

Deepak and Nitin Patil from Mindsensors have created another awesome Kickstarter project under the OpenEelectrons.com flag: the PiUPS, an uninterruptable power supply for the Raspberry Pi in a very compact package. It’s an inline power supply system that constantly charges the backup batteries when it’s connected to the mains or another external power source.  When this external power source gets disconnected, ...

If you are involved in LEGO Education, then this may be the perfect place for you to discuss with your peers.  Below is a copy and paste of the original invitation.  The target audience includes parents involved in FLL and people with a general interest in learning and using LEGO in learning, so teachers and other educators.  However, due to ...

These files have existed for a little while now but I never got the official OK to distribute them.  However, one of my readers (Marius Steffen) was given two Dropbox links via LEGO Customer Support to these specific files.  That must mean that the documentation is no longer under NDA and so I now feel no reason not share them ...

One of my readers, Elias Barcia, mailed me back in May 2013 to ask for some input for a university project he was working on: make the three generations of MINDSTORMS, RCX, NXT and EV3 communicate with eachother.  I gave him some feedback and pointers and some time passed.  I had all but forgotten about it until he mailed me ...