News You Can Use

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

The LEGO Mindstorms NXT community is growing! It’s wonderful to see new sites with great content popping up left and right.

We work hard to dig up stories that we think you’ll enjoy. See something you like on nxtasy.org? Feel free to post it on your own blog or website. We are all for viral news as it is an excellent way to spread the word on the latest and greatest thing to hit our community. All we ask is that you make sure you link to our original post.

If you’re new to blogging and unsure of how to format it, here are a few ways to do it:

- Include the link in the body of your post:

Just saw this great robot on nxtasy.org!

- Or just add a line at the end:

[Via nxtasy.org]

Thanks! And keep up the good work!

Rachel
nxtasy.org Editor

Posted in nxtasy, news | No Comments »

RoboRealm Machine Vision for NXT

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

The talented folks at RoboRealm have added a module that provides machine vision capabilities to the LEGO Mindstorms NXT. This free software allows you to control your robots from a PC over a Bluetooth connection, and with a wireless camera, a digitizer, and a little VBScript, gives you the ability to incorporate machine vision to do some pretty cool things.

To demonstrate, RoboRealm hooked up a wireless camera to a TriBot and programmed it to use machine vision to help find a blue ball, pick it up, and move it to an orange cone. Take a look at the videos below to see the robot in action. A comprehensive tutorial is also available to get you started.

Video of robot view:

Video of 3rd-person perspective:

Posted in video, development, news, software, hacking | 25 Comments »

MS Robotics Studio November 2006 CTP Released

Wednesday, November 8th, 2006

Microsoft Robotics Studio sees an updated community technology preview for November. This release brings new security support, visual programming language improvements, simulation improvements (like the new wireframe view), a new deployment tool, and service improvments.

While you will see some significant new features in this preview, from here we will be winding down and focused on finalizing what we have for version 1. If you encounter any significant issues after installing this latest preview, please post something to us in our newsgroup. Feature requests are still welcome, but we may save these for our next release.

Posted in development, news, software | No Comments »