I’ve been quite busy the last few days with various performance testing.  A friend of mine is keen to develop a robo-football platform.  Due to the nature of the game, very fast sensor updates and processing is required to track the ball and the opponents.  I’ve offered to work on an extension for the NXT allowing him to hook up ...

While not exactly robot related, I thought this was pretty noteworthy.  92% is really not bad at all!

Great systems administrators do not show up at work in the mornings, have some coffee and a biscuit, and then decide to install a server operating system because they have got a few hours before lunch.  Great system administrators work with a plan. That’s right folks!  Great system administrators plan their coffee and biscuits ahead of time and we all ...

Here’s the first release of the HiTechnic Prototype Board driver for RobotC.  It has all the basic functionality you’ll need to use it. byte HTPBReadIO(tSensors _link, byte _mask) Returns values of inputs specified by mask void HTPBWriteIO(tSensors _link, byte _mask) Writes values to outputs specified by mask void HTPBSetupIO(tSensors _link, byte _mask) Configure the ports for input or output according ...

This morning the postman delivered a small package from HiTechnic, the Lego NXT Sensor folks.  Steve, one of the engineers, asked me if I would be interested in writing a RobotC driver for their Prototype Board.  I said I was, so he told me he’d send one and here it is.  I guess now I have to fulfill my end ...

The HiTechnic IR Link Sensor allows you to use IR signals to communicate with the Power Functions IR receivers, the remote controllable Lego trains and the venerable RCX. I bought myself one a few weeks ago and have been busy tinkering with it ever since.  I contacted the HiTechnic company to ask for some documentation on how this sensor worked ...

Using a pot meter to test the MAX127 is not a hugely useful way to exploit the power of this ADC.  Instead, this time I have replaced the pot meter with an IR receiver. The main part of this circuit is still exactly the same as in the previous MAX127 post.  The only difference this time is the IR receiver, ...

The Lego online webshop might not be the cheapest way to get your complete sets but they do carry the full range of HiTechnic NXT sensors, many of which are not sold in Europe through toy stores or other online retailers.  I ordered my HiTechnic IR Link Sensor on Saturday evening and received it just this morning.  That might seem ...

It’s been a little while since my last article about adding peripherals to the NXT, but not due to the lack of experimenting and programming, let me tell you.  In my quest to tame the Maxim MAX127, I ran into a few annoying bugs in RobotC.  The first one involved not being able to use structs of bytes to send ...

If you’ve been reading my articles (1, 2) on the Mindsensors PCF8574A board but are unable to purchase one for any number of reasons, here’s a blatant clone made on a breadboard.  It will function pretty much the same way as the Real Thing but doesn’t look nearly as nice.  Below you will find the schematic and the values of ...