Bot Bench I'd Rather Be Building Robots
Sunday morning and all is quiet in the Soldaat house. This is the current state of my Lego Lair, as my wife likes to call it. It’s a bit of a mess and I’m starting to have trouble finding things on my desk. When I am done writing this post, I’ll do some tidying up.
Some cool things I’m working on that I can talk about:
- Testing the upcoming Dexter Industries GPS Sensor;
- An enhanced version of the IR Link Power Functions library, motor control will be close the native ROBOTC NXT motor functions. This is almost completed, needs additional comments and documentation;
- RCX to NXT (and vice versa) messaging via IR using the IR Link, using both the standard single byte and ROBOTC’s enhanced two-byte protocol. This is working well now. Thanks to Thorsten for testing this stuff. It needs a bit of tidying up and documentation;
- Playing with the new MSP430 Launchpad boards that came in the other day. I can make the LEDs blink (!);
- Playing with the Rotacaster wheels.
With all these peripherals, I need more USB ports on this laptop. It has just 3 of them (plus a USB/E-SATA port). However, that said, it comes with a genuine COM port! That’s a pretty rare thing for modern laptops but it’s great when I am working with both the RCX IR Tower –and- the I2C protocol analyser.
It’s fun to be a tinkerer!
In that case, I see why you didn’t get a USB IR tower! Of coarse, you can try using one of those things that gives you more USB ports, and although I had trouble with the original software and this method, it should work with RobotC or BricxCC. If that doesn’t work, you can at least plug all non-lego hardware to it.
The tower was a gift as was the RCX, so I’m happy to have the one I was given.
Vice versa? … you’ve got me intrigued!
It’s been tested with both single and double byte messages and works very nicely 🙂
I don’t quite see how you get the RCX to communicate with the NXT though. The IR Link sensor cannot _receive_ any messages, can it?
Someone in my family has the exact same kind of laptop. I get slightly envious when I see that serial port as it’d come in handy when programming ucontrollers. Besides, Toshiba’s the way to go!
I also have a question. Just to the left of the top left corner of the laptops lid there is a white and grey enclosure. It was in the NXT colors but I’d never seen anything like it before. Can you tell us what it is?
That’s my camera’s charging/usb base. In the picture it’s upside down. It’s not some weird prototype 🙂 See http://goo.gl/SzBC for an example.
Ah, ok :). Figures. Your just the one that’s getting a chance to play with all these new “Top Secret” NXT toys. Figured it’d be something amazing :).
@Jetro yes, the IR Link is perfectly capable of receiving IR messages 🙂