Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots

I downloaded most of these background pictures from the LEGO EDUCATION website via some Google searching.  They’re very nice high-res images of their models.  The reason I picked the LEGO EDUCATION images is because they’re less busy than the retail ones and have a beautifully clean, uncluttered and white background.  Both these themes are essentially the same but one uses ...

Tristan from Tris10.com (yeah, very clever domain name!) sent me a FindBall NXT and EmitIR to play with and write a ROBOTC driver for. The FindBall NXT The FindBall NXT is a sensor specifically made to locate a 40KHz modulated IR signal, as used by the RoboCup Junior balls.  Tris10 claim that it is currently the best sensor for this ...

When Damien Kee asked me to write a review for his latest book, the first thought that came to my mind was “Uhm, I am not a teacher! How am I supposed to have an opinion on this?”.  Truth be told, I have done quite a few workshops in classrooms with kids, adults and a mix of both.  So while ...

Robotics is great but if you have a lot of kids that want to take part, you’re going to need a fairly large number of sets.  You don’t want to have spend the first 15 minutes of each class rebuilding the base robot for the lessons of that day. Up until now, you could use the ROBOTC Virtual Worlds, which ...

Last week, I received no less than 6 of the Bricktronics Breakout Boards from Wayne & Layne LLC.  If you think that name sounds familiar, you’re right, they’re the authors of the “Make Lego and Arduino Projects” book.  These adapters would definitely be indispensable if you’re planning to do any kind of tinkering with your Arduino and whatever NXT peripherals ...

A little while ago, I was asked by Packt Publishing to review one of their new e-books called “Instant LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3” by Gary Garber.  It’s a small (82 pages) e-book that is “A concise guide full of step-by-step recipes to teach you how to build and program an advanced robot.”  It aims to be usable for both an experienced ...

The ROBOTC 3.x Driver Suite is in maintenance mode right now and I’ve decided to put it all on Git.  I will no longer create releases like I did before, rather, I will simply push to the repository as bugs are fixed.  There will be no more feature additions to this suite either.  I am working on a complete overhaul ...

Virtual Router Manager In an earlier article, I had written about how to allow your EV3 to connect to your laptop (or desktop) with a shared WiFi network, using a feature called Hosted Network.  It essentially turns your computer into an Access Point (AP).  Since then I’ve had a bit more experience with it and I’ve found a very easy ...

The EV3 has a lot of cool features but a push-to-eject micro-SD card drive isn’t one of them.  It’s fine for users who don’t work with custom Linux distributions on their brick, but a major PITA (no, not the Döner Kebab kind) if you’re like me.  It takes a needle nose pliers and a lot of patience to remove the ...

Ralph Hempel is no stranger to MINDSTORMS and he’s been quietly working on something very special: a port of Debian Wheezy on the EV3.  The folks of the Debian organisation wouldn’t let him use the Debian name (for copyright reasons), so this project is called ev3dev. What is ev3dev? It’s a complete Linux distribution for the EV3.  What do I ...