Tag Archives: NXT

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 ...

This is what the NXT should’ve had in the first place!  Thank goodness for companies like Mindsensors.  They’ve created the first touch panel sensor for the NXT that sits on top of the standard screen and allows you to draw and press on it with a stylus. I haven’t got it yet but I just got a mail saying that ...

Are you in the Netherlands and want to come see lots of cool robots?  Then come to the HCC Robotica Open Day in Hooglanderveen this coming Saturday 1 October. I’ll be there with my NXTs, so if you want come by, to say “hello” or check out all the cool stuff that’s there, don’t hesitate to drop by!  It’s always ...

Since I’ve been working on my Kinect application I’ve had to deal with Bluetooth addresses a lot and it seems pretty tricky to map these to their associated friendly names.  To avoid the problem altogether, I’ve started renaming all my bricks to the last 3 LSB (Least Significant Bytes), seeing as the 3 MSBs are always the same anyway.  This ...

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 ...

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 ...

Last night I gave a presentation at the Competa Conference Center. I managed to make the audience listen to my almost endless driveling for a whopping 2 hours or so. I had a lot of fun doing it and judging from the reactions from the people there, I think they had fun, too. I brought a lot of robots and ...

Next Thursday (8 September 2011) I will be giving a LEGO Mindstorms NXT presentation at the Competa Conference Center in Rijswijk. Some of the topics I’ll be talking about include: Hardware – what’s inside the brick? Sensors – standard, 3rd party and home brew. Some examples, both small and large (and extra-large) of what you can build with it. The ...

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 ...

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. ...