Holonomic Drive

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

Here’s another proof that one doesn’t need omniwheels to holonomic drive.
UPDATE: our forums member Ghost42 published more info on this work here.

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Automated NXT Ashcan

Thursday, May 31st, 2007

In a series of videos, ‘pemiamos’ shows the constuction of an NXT ashcan which opens when you get close to it. Great idea and nice movies!

See the movies: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7

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Servo Interface for NXT

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

Michael Gasperi latest hack - interfacing the NXT to a servo motor. In practice, this interface can control other analog devices. Here he show how the digital-to-analog converter (connected to the NXT) is used to control a voltage controlled oscillator that produces pulses capable of driving a RC Servo. More details here and in this forums post. Also, Michael used an old IBM 07G0032 keypad in this case, and he has the details here.

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LEJOS OSEK open firmware for NXT

Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007

LEJOS OSEK is an open source firmware for LEGO Mindstorms NXT. LEJOS OSEK consists of I/O driver of LEJOS NXJ platform source code, TOPPERS OSEK RTOS source code, and glue code to make them work together.
LEJOS OSEK can provide:
-ANSI C/C++ (not C based, but real C) programming environment by using GCC
(GNU-ARM) tool chain
-LEJOS NXJ platform based device API for NXT Sensors, Motors, and other devices
-TOPPERS OSEK provided real-time multi tasking features proven in automotive
industry
-Rate Monotonic Scheduling with 1msec resolution by using OSEK Alarm
-Several examples (include a NXTway)
-Fast execution and less memory consumption
I.e. Application is executed natively on the ARM7 and NXTway consumed totally just about 20k bytes (includes LEJOS OSEK itself)

LEJOS OSEK is focused on real-time control applications for NXT, thus nice GUI/file system are out of target. Additionally, we can provide a graphical modeling, simulation, and code generation environment which is called Embedded Coder Robot NXT.
Embedded Coder Robot NXT is LEGO Mindstorms NXT specific Blockset of The MathWorks MATLAB(R) & Simulink(R) products. LEJOS OSEK will be also used as the run time environment of the Embedded Coder Robot NXT applications. Embedded Coder Robot NXT can be downloaded from The MathWorks File Exchange site:

[via Lugnet]

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NXT Radar - Part III

Monday, May 21st, 2007

In this post I’ll describe how I programmed the NXT Radar using LabView. I’ve decided to use LabView, the core engine of NXT-G, to demonstrate how to use a more ‘mature’ graphical programming language for NXT. The NI LabView toolkit for Mindstorms NXT (download free in NI website) allows, besides making new NXT-G blocks (which I’ve covered some advanced issues of in previous posts), to compile programs for the NXT. The compiler used is the same as in NXT-G, yet one has more access to low-level implementation of the firmware commands and typically less overhead. In writing the code I decided to adopt a unconventional approach - let the NXT stream data to the PC as the Bluetooth master. (more…)

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Challenge 2 - 10 days left!

Sunday, May 20th, 2007

Only 10 days till the end of our second challenge! If you forgot - the rules are here. Prizes are $60 for first place and $35 for second place in 2 categories given as cupons for purchasing in mindsensors.com.

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New Contributor to NXTasy.org

Thursday, May 17th, 2007

NXTasy.org welcomes our new contributor Daniele Benedettelli. Danny (an MDP member) has made some great contributions to the NXT community, including an amazing Jhonny 5, Turtle, the Cube Solver (see below) and soon-to-come starwars AT-ST biped model. His website http://daniele.benedettelli.com/ is among the best NXT sites I’ve seen, with clear information and great graphical design. Danny also made contributions to the NXC Bluetooth library which is now part of the NXC package.

Welcome aboard!

Guy Ziv
NXTasy.org

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Danny’s NXT Rubik’s cube solver is now fully automated!

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

After a long hard work, the Lego Rubik Utopy project is finished with success!

Check out details about this new generation LEGO Rubik’s cube solver here.

The new amazing video is available here.

Daniele Benedettelli 

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Programming NXT with AUTOMGEN 8.0

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

AUTOGEN is an automation software created by IRAI. It now supports NXT control over USB or Bluetooth. See here for details.

AUTOMGEN 8.004 version is available for download here : www.irai.com/a8e

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AT-ST Moonwalker

Monday, May 14th, 2007

It still doesn’t seems to move well, but it’s a VERY cool design…

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NxtShot version 2.0

Monday, May 14th, 2007

Here’s version 2.0 of the NxtShot I posted on April 26th. Don’t miss the fantastic SketchUp animation showing the canon model at the end of the video.

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