Tag Archives: Featured

Dexter Industries have started selling their new Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) that has both a gyroscope and an accelerometer. Gyroscope The gyro has 3 ranges, 250, 500 and 2000 degrees per second with 1/128, 1/64 and 1/16 degree accuracy respectively.  It can measure the rate of turn on all three axes.  The gyro also has a temperature sensor that is ...

Windows Management Instrumentation I’ve been programming a fair bit of C# lately and one of the things I needed to do was find a list of all the COM ports used by NXTs that had been paired with the currently connected Bluetooth controller on the laptop. WMI, or Windows Management Instrumentation, is a mechanism in Microsoft Windows that allows you ...

This one was a request by one my readers and what a great suggestion! Taking this sensor apart proved a little bit of a challenge.  It wasn’t as eager to give ups secrets as readily as some of the other ones I’ve opened up in the past.  I also didn’t have a replacement cap for this, so I had to ...

After what seems like a dog’s age, a new release of ROBOTC has been, well, released (as is often the case with releases). Here’s what I know so far. Many platforms, one program They’ve done a major overhaul of the internal workings of the ROBOTC program and compiler, you no longer need to install multiple versions for each platform you ...

In just 6 weeks’, the biggest, most exciting LEGO show is going to take place in Zwolle, The Netherlands. This year the Mindstorms and Technic themes will join forces and have a massive combined stand that will take up a complete separate area at the venue. There will be other themes there too, as well as many, many user-created displays. ...

The Teemino As I mentioned in an earlier post, OpenElectrons (Mindsensors) have released the Teemino and will soon release a shield (NXShield-M) that is compatible with this board and the ArduinoMega. Lucky for me, one of each of these arrived in the post this morning, unlucky for me, I don’t have a phone that runs Android 2.3.1, a prerequisite for ...

Microsoft has released a new refresh of the Kinect SDK. The new beta has a few driver updates and some run time enhancements.  They also worked on improving the documentation. More information about the latest Kinect SDK update can be found on the official website: [LINK] You can download the 32bit SDK here: [LINK]. The 64bit SDK can be found ...

Hi and welcome to the new site.  No, I’ve not been hijacked, kidnapped or otherwise subverted.  This is the new home for “I’d Rather Be Building Robots”. Since that whole sentence would make for a really terrible domain name, I did some brain storming for a new name and I came up empty.  Good thing my dad was in the ...

When National Geographic contacted me last week about writing an article about a robotics article they had published on the web I must say I was quite surprised. The article itself is a very interesting one.  It asks the question whether we are ready for all the robots that are slowly coming into our every day lives. Personally, I think ...

After a prolonged hibernation period, the Mindsqualls project is back from the dead and version 2.0 has been released. I was using an older version in my super secret Kinect project, so it is nice to see that is being maintained again. Mindsqualls is one of the easiest to use .Net library for controlling your NXT using C# or VB.Net. ...