Are you a budding evil scientist but lack the electronics skills to build your own sharks with laser beams?  Well, you no longer need to outsource your plans for world domination to second rate henchmen.  Now you can learn the skills needed to do this kind of thing yourself. HiTechnic have brought out the Experimenter’s Kit A, which consists of ...

In two previous articles (here and here) I had tried to come up with a way to use IR light to gauge distances.  It wasn’t very successful, but such is the risk of trying something new.  So last night, whilst sitting at my laptop, I wondered if there was a way to emulate a $10 device (a Sharp IR Sensor) ...

“Subsumption?” I hear you say, “What’s that?”  Subsumption is a form of behaviour based robotics where multiple behaviours can control a robot using a hierarchical system.  However, don’t take my word for it!  Check out Thom Roach’s great new blog.  He’s written some really ace articles on the subject without reverting to dry stuffy theory like you see in most ...

Some minor changes in this version and some bug fixes. Changelog: HTDIR-test1.c (0.2) Partial rewrite by Dick Swan, waits a little longer for sensor initialisation Nicer intro screen Less screen flickering, only updated if there’s been a change in data. common.h: (0.3.2) makes use of the new alpha’s built-in clearI2CBus(). It is still defined for the older firmwares MSLL-driver.h: (0.5) ...

Ever wondered what an IR Seeker V2 looks like on the inside but didn’t have a spare $50 you could just throw away?  Well wonder no more!  I was given a pre-production IR Seeker by HiTechnic to write a RobotC driver for it.  The lens cap on it wasn’t as clear as the production version so they sent me a ...

A new version of the RobotC Driver Suite has been released.  A driver for the Mindsensors LineLeader sensor was added.  The initial driver was written by Thom Roach and modified by me to fit better into the suite’s framework.  Thank you Thom for your work! Changelog: Many drivers had their API renamed subtly to be more consistent.  Check the individual ...

For all your Mindsensors specific questions and ideas, you can now point your browsers to their own forums here: [LINK].  Right now it’s still a little quiet, but there’s a small but knowledgeable crowd of sensor beta testers and seasoned robotics programmers ready to answer (most of) your questions. So come over, introduce yourself and ask away.

A new version of the RobotC Driver Suite has been released.  Two new drivers were added and some improvements were made in the I2C bus error handling. Changelog: NEW: Added driver for AT24C512 EEPROM chip. NEW: Added Light Sensor driver with calibration!  You can use one of the test programs to calibrate for both white and black.  Calibration data is ...

The HiTechnic IR Link is capable of many things including controlling your Power Function devices.  The one thing you couldn’t do was transmit regular data.  That is, until now.  The IR Link has several transmission modes, 0x02 for example is used for the PF functionality.  There is another mode 0x00, UART-mode, which can be used to transmit 8 bytes at ...

After a couple of hours of fiddling with HTML in Notepad, I’m proud to present the new and improved project page for the 3rd Party RobotC Driver project.  I’ll add more to it as time goes by.  For your tree killing pleasure, I’ve also added a PDF version of the documentation so you can print it out more easily. You ...