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 ...

Looks like Robotics Academy released another release of ROBOTC 3.x.  There’s a list of bugs that have been fixed but one of the coolest new things is the ability to go beyond the 160 functions limit! You can download it from the usual place: [LINK]. Change log: Fixed silent updater bug Modified sensor scale and full count settings for gyros ...

Minor fixes, enhancements and cleanups This release has a couple of small fixes and also gets rid of a couple of really bone-headed bugs in the Dexter Industry IMU sensor driver. The sensor driver has been tested with a real segway by Laurens Valk, check out the video below: The new IMU driver now also features the ability to switch ...

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 ...

I got this mail a few days ago, which I think some of my readers might find interesting.  It’s not a new male enhancement formula, rather an offer from Robotics Academy for a free Robot Virtual World programming course. Below you will find a copy of the mail (with some tweaks to make it a little more readable on my ...

If you have an NXT set but have lost your CD, you can now legally download a copy of the ISO image of NXT-G 2.0 (retail, not edu) from the LEGO website.  Why this is only available now and not earlier is a mystery to me but it’s here now so grab it while you can. If you have an ...

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 ...

The Robotics Academy folks just announced the availability of a new version (3.03) of ROBOTC.  Quite a few bugs have been fixed.  You can download the latest version right here: [LINK]. 3.02 to 3.03 Change log: Fixed issue with nMotorEncoderTarget when issuing a positive target with a negative speed. Removed windows that would cause Virtual Worlds to crash when opening. ...

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 ...