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Xander

Xander Soldaat is a Software Engineer and former Infrastructure Architect. He loves building and programming robots. He recently had the opportunity to turn his robotics hobby into his profession and has started working for Robomatter, the makers of ROBOTC and Robot Virtual Words.

Using Robot Virtual Worlds inside a VM

If you’re like me and you use a lot of Virtual Machines, then this may be of some use to you.  In Robot Virtual Worlds, you have 3 camera settings: Follow mode: you can use the wheel to zoom in and out. Camera view from above Free movement: hold left button and move to move the view. The wheel is ...

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Released: ROBOTC 4.28

Just in time for Christmas! A new release of ROBOTC for both LEGO MINDSTORMS and VEX.  So many new features and bug fixes have been added for all the platforms that the original ROBOTC blog had to have two separate posts for the releases.  I won’t rehash everything that’s on them; you can read the one for LEGO MINDSTORMS here: ...

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Coming Soon: Mindsensors Grove Sensor Adapter for EV3 or NXT

I was wondering if a one of the 3rd party sensor companies was ever going to come up with an EV3/NXT adapter for the Grove System.  Not sure what it is?  Grove System is an interface standard that allows you to connect all sorts of peripherals to your microcontroller.  There are adapters for Arduino and RaspberryPi, but not for the ...

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The FATCATLAB’s Meow: EVB

Imagine an EV3 with a backlit screen, a 1GHz CPU, instead a 300MHz one and 8 times more memory, that’s pretty much what the EVB is.  It’s a cape (kind of like an Arduino Shield) for the BeagleBone Black (BBB) and it’s awesome.  It really, really makes me wish the EV3 had a backlit screen like this thing. I was ...

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Rotacaster Omniwheel Sale on NOW!

If you’re looking to get some of the coolest wheels available on the market today, then go check out the Rotacaster Omniwheels.  They’re currently having a sale on their website with a 15% discount.  You can find their shop site here: [LINK].  Use the discount code: RoboticsXmas to get the 15% off.  The sale ends December 19, so don’t delay too long. ...

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Mindsensors Programming Poll

Mindsensors are doing a poll to find out which is your favourite programming environment for the EV3!  You can guess which one I picked. That’s right, ROBOTC, of course. You can find the poll on their page, on the left side, half way down and just below the downloads menu. Make your vote count!

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Cool Kickstarter: DynePod: Bringing You The Internet of Toys

The DynePod Internet of Toys product I wrote about a little while ago now has a live Kickstarter campaign!  Go check it out, there may be a few Early Bird rewards left, but they’re selling quite nicely!  I love that there’s a “Maker Pack” reward that comes with a programming cable, so you can reprogram it, like an Arduino!

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Internet of Toys: DynePods

What is this?  Something that’s not directly robot related?  Why, yes it is!  I was contacted by Beth Winkowski, the PR person for Dynepic about an upcoming Kickstarter campaign.  It was a standard email and I wasn’t sure if the product, DynaPod, was something my readers would be interested in.  I decided to respond and tell her I’d pass it on to ...

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Released: ROBOTC 4.27

This is a copy of the post on the ROBOTC website, the original announcement can be found here: [LINK]. The ROBOTC Development Team is very excited to announce our latest release update, ROBOTC 4.27! This update is for the both the VEX Robotics (CORTEX and IQ) and LEGO MINDSTORMS (NXT and EV3) robotics systems and includes new features, functionality and a load of ...

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Cool Kickstarter: Ground Drone

This time it’s not a little robot for educational purposes, but rather a kick-ass looking robotics platform that can even climb stairs!  Before I start going into details, check out the video. This thing looks like it could come straight out of an action movie! It it made up of articulated sections that you can easily exchange.  Here are two ...

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