Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
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 ...
Read More »A Smoother LineLeader
Sometimes even the greatest leaders need a little help. This is also true of the Mindsensors LineLeader sensor. I’ve been working on maze solving robot and noticed that the robot’s state engine would sometimes be triggered by transient readings from the sensor. It would suddenly think that a crossing was detected and swerve to the right or left. Rather than ...
Read More »Under Development: Dexter Industries XBee sensor
Dexter Industries hasn’t been sitting still in the past few weeks; they’ve been busy developing a very cool new sensor. It’s an NXT sensor that leverages the XBee as a means of communication. No longer will you be limited to slow, one-way Bluetooth connections between just your master and 3 slaves. With XBee you have can have up to 16 ...
Read More »Rotacaster One-Kit Omniwheel Program Update
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 ...
Read More »Rotacaster One-Kit Omniwheel
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 ...
Read More »Another Omniwheeled Robot
Earlier this week I received another package from Rotacaster with some more wheels for me to test and play with. These ones had new molded hubs, instead of the white 3D printed ones. The grip on the axles is much better now and they’re still working on making them even better. The wheels have three different durometers (hardness) and I’m ...
Read More »Apollo, The Littlest LineLeader
This is Apollo, the smallest NXT based line follower I’ve ever made. It’s loosely based on A-Maze-Ing, which I designed and built quite a while ago. Apollo is equipped some pretty cool stuff: The new Mindsensors Numpad A Mindsensors LineLeader sensor Two Rotacaster wheels The program in this robot is based on the same one I wrote for the Mean ...
Read More »dGPS Available Now!
Dexter Industries have released their GPS sensor; it’s now available on sale for $105 US. It’s the world’s first GPS sensor specifically made for the NXT. I’ve had one of these beauties for a while now and it’s a lot of fun to play with. You can read all about it on this page here: [LINK], which includes downloads of ...
Read More »Lego Digital Designer 4 is out
When I started up Lego Digital Designer (LDD) this morning, I was greeted with a popup telling me that a new version was out. 120 odd Megabytes downloaded and installed later, I was presented with a very slick looking UI. The thing I love about this version the most is the building instructions (BI). It now breaks up the model ...
Read More »A-Maze-Ing
My current project, well, the one I seem to be spending the most time on is a robot called A-Maze-Ing. It is based on a Lego Mindstorms NXT brick. This robot is, or rather, will be, a line-maze solving robot. The first challenge in building this robot was its size. Rules dictate the robot should not exceed 15x15x15 cm at ...
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