Tag Archives: NXT-G

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 ...

I may not be much of an NXT-G programmer but I can spot a good thing when I see it.  Gus over at HiTechnic has been a very busy man. Last time he brought us the really awesome PID motor block but this time he went the extra mile and made no less than three new blocks: A new IR ...

Give it up for my main man Andy Milluzzi who, with some help from John Hansen, created the world’s first NXT-G block that leverages the NXT’s RS485 communication abilities! Well done. What does that mean?  Well now you can connect two bricks, back-to-back with a cable connected between their S4 ports and communicate at a blinding 921600 bps!  That’s quite ...

Yesterday, Martijn Boogaarts and I held a Mindstorms NXT workshop at the one of the offices of Sioux, a software development company. We had a room full of eager software engineers and their offspring. Martijn did the general presentation and an introduction to NXT-G.  I took care of the ROBOTC presentation and quick intro. There were plenty of NXT sets ...

Over on the HiTechnic blog, Gus has written up a new article about his new NXT-G sin/cos and atan2 blocks. It’s chockfull of explanations and some examples. For the speed freaks among us, you’ll be happy to know that the integer variant takes about 0.5ms to do a calculation and the floating point version takes approximately 0.75ms.  That’s pretty fast, ...

Thanks to the hard work of Gus Jansson of HiTechnic, you can now do sin, cos and atan2, all from the comfort of your NXT-G programming environment!  How cool is that? Just go to this page and scroll to the bottom.  There are integer versions for NXT-G 1.0 and floating point ones for NXT-G 2.0. They’re proper NXT-G blocks and ...

I made some updates to the line following program for the Rotacaster One-Kit Omniwheel robot.  This version 2.0 allows you to adjust the Gain and Power variables by turning the back wheels back and forth.  When you’re happy with the values, you can hit one of the bumpers and it’ll start the auto-calibration routine and attempt to follow the course ...

As I was building one of my previous omniwheel frames, I wondered if I could rebuild it using nothing more than the parts that came with an NXT 2.0 Retail kit and three Rotacaster omniwheels.  After a few hours I came up with this: Quite nice and a pretty stiff frame that doesn’t bend much. Please note that not all ...