Solenoids on Lego NXT
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Aother nice project from markr80 - NXT controlled solenoids. Well documented video, and good references too (see YouTube description here)
Posted in video, news, knowledge | 1 Comment »
Quantum Torque NXT sensors
Monday, July 9th, 2007
I never heard of Quantum Torque, did you? Well, their website says that “Quantum Torque is a independent Australian internet shop which aims to provide components and products that can be used for robotics and embedded electronics projects”. The picture above is a ‘cball Infrared Ball Sensor’ - 8 x infrared photodetectors arranged in a 180 degree semi-circle. It has I2C interface, and their site has NXT-G and RobotC examples. Other products on their site is a ‘iball’ (1 x infrared photodetector with NXT socket) and an NXT breakout PCB board. Check their site for details.
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NXTasy Challenge #3 - The ANxT!
Monday, July 9th, 2007
NXTasy challenge #3 if finally annouched! Your mission will be to build an NXT ‘Ant’ or ‘ANxT’ in short.
Ants are remarkable little creatures, capable of lifting weights several times their own body weight (if you search the net, you frequently find sites quoting that ants can lift 10, 20 and even 50 times their own body weight. However, I could not found a scientific proof for these values…).
The goal of your ANxT would be to move an object (the ‘weight’) a distance of 1 meter without touching the floor. The grade will be 50% determined by the object weight/ANxT weight ratio, 30% by the mass transfer rate and 20% by how much your ANxT is, well, ‘antish’…
Oh, and the object must be bigger then your ANxT in all dimensions, did I mention that already 
?
The full details, rules, submission procedure, deadline etc. are here.
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Friday, July 6th, 2007
Our forums reader 222doc published about this NXT creation he calls ‘IT’. IT moves by bending it’s knees till the upper part touches ground, and lifts the other (previously bottom) part up, and vise versa. More details (any video soon?) here.
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New NBC/NXC beta
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007A new beta version b31 is on its way from John Hansen. Quoting from Lugnet:
“…
The main new features are a safecall keyword and compiler switch which lets you call subroutines from multiple threads without having to manually wrap the call in Acquire & Release. If you mark a function as being a safecall function then the compiler will handle it automatically for you. And if you want all your functions to be called using the safecall convention then you can simply add the -safecall switch to the NBC command line.
Also new in NBC b31 as well as in BricxCC’s built-in version of b31 there is now support for the RICScript programming language which lets you create RIC files via a text-based script. There will be enhancements here that involve importing a sprite from an external file and things like that but for now it is at least fully functional and well integrated with the latest BricxCC test release. “
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Connect a GPS with pbLua
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007Ralph Hempel describes how to use pbLua to stream Bluetooth GPS data to the NXT. See this page for the code and details.
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