Tag Archives: ROBOTC

Using the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensor as an old fashioned NXT 1.0 Light Sensor as very simple in NXT-G but a little more involved in ROBOTC. The old Light Sensor uses a small red LED to illuminate the target and a small sensor to see how much was reflected. The new colour sensor can be used in a very similar ...

So you just bought yourself one of the NXT 2.0 Colour Sensors and you’re keen to get started with it. You browse through the example programs that are shipped with ROBOTC and open the “ColorSensor.c” program. “300 lines of code to read a simple colour?” you ask yourself. Fear not, it’s a lot easier than that. In order to use ...

The fine folks at the Robotics Academy have released a new version of ROBOTC for the Cortex and PIC.  There are quite a number of changes: Updated new Master Firmware for VEX Cortex Fixed “Cannot find firmware file” download error. Additional Integrity Checks on Firmware Downloading & qualifiers are now accepted on structure elements. Improved robustness for communicating with Cortex ...

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 ...

I’ve been hacking away at all of the drivers, making them meaner, leaner and easier to use. To go back to the HTAC (HiTechnic Accelerator Sensor) driver as an example, check this out:   HTAC-test1.c (in suite v 1.8.1) HTAC-test1.c (1st round) HTAC-test1.c (now) Total code bytes 4598 1643 (-64%) 1,387 (-70%) Memory locations 716 420 (-41%) 200 (-72%) Procedures ...

I am currently working on rewriting the driver suite to make them leaner.  They won’t be backwards compatible with the old ones. Some of the changes will include: HiTechnic Sensor MUX support separated out from common.h.  If you want to use it, you will need to include a a file for it.  All subsequently included driver files will automatically have ...

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 ...

A new release of the Driver Suite has been uploaded to Source Forge. Changes: common.h: added check for sensor type for all I2C calls.  To disable this check, please refer to the source code. Dexter Industries dGPS: added missing DGPSreadDistToDestination() function HT Angle Sensor: added Sensor MUX support HT Compass: enhanced HTMCreadRelativeHeading() function Lego US: Added lots of new functions: ...

Among all of the cool presents I got for Christmas this year were two new shields for my Arduino. I got a L298N Shield and a DFRobot LCD Keypad Shield. I wanted some new shields so I could write drivers for the Arduino port of ROBOTC. I found the original C++ driver for the LCD shield and quickly ported it ...

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 ...