Site Maintenance
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Bear with us as I troubleshoot some forum issues. I was debating whether or not to take the whole system down for maintenance, but it appears some parts are still working. Shouldn’t be too long before all is resolved. I apologize for the inconvenience.
It’s been a while since I’ve checked in on everybody. I must say, it’s an absolute honor to host such a great community of people. Thank you for all your support and contributions. And, of course, thanks to Guy for leading the nxtasy charge! Since I’m here for a few, I’ll also try to do a few touch-ups on the site — some major, some minor. In the meantime, please excuse the dust. Thanks!
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New website - nxtprograms.com
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008Dave Parker opened a new NXT website, where he posts free detailed building instructions and downloadable programs for lots of fun projects that require only the basic retail NXT set.
Projects are sorted by difficulty levels, and are have well documented photographed building instructions and programs.
Check it out - http://www.nxtprograms.com/
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Multi-Sensitivity Acceleration Sensor for NXT
Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
Mindsensors.com announced a new multi-range acceleration sensor for the NXT. It’s a three axis sensor with program-selectable range of 2.5G, 3.3G, 6.7G, 10.0G. More details here.
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Official Specification of the Power-Functions IR Protocol
Friday, January 25th, 2008Lego just released the specification of the Power Functions infrared protocol. Although I have already reverse engineered the commands that the remote-control sends and was able to send these commands from an add-on board connected to the NXT, the receiver can actually respond to more commands. It can respond to commands that start motors and keep them on indefinitely (the existing PF remote only sends commands that keep the motors running for a bit more than a second). It can also provide a variable amount of power to the motors, not just full-forward or full-reverse, which is all the existing remote sends.
So the specification should allow custom remotes to produce more sophisticated behaviors. Also, the document contains the precise rules and tolerances, so it should make custom remotes (and custom receivers) more robust.
A quick update: I was able to emit the new commands form my home-made IR link, and thereby to run the PF motors at various power levels and to run them indefinitely when the remote was off.
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WiFiCamBot
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008I seem to be getting in a trend of creating robots and not fully completing them… WiFiCamBot is one of them. The intent was to create a bot that I could use PF
to remote control with an attached camera all wirelessly connected. WiFiCamBot uses a Panasonic BL-C30 WiFi colour camera with built-in webserver to capture and transmit video via my local network to one of my websites. This is all done with no wires tethered to the bot - all power is on-board and it uses the Power Functions system for remote control.
Visit my site for more details and images: www.plastibots.com
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LDraw NXT parts kit overhaul
Friday, January 18th, 2008
Philo published an improved version of all LDraw NXT parts, quite realistic as can be judged from the above image. You can download the files, as well as see some information of the NXT color scheme issues at Philo’s webpage:
http://philohome.com/nxtldraw/nxtldraw.htm
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NXTruck by NXTLiftBoy
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
Here’s a video showing NXTLiftBoy latest project. Here’re a few details I got from him:
About the model:
This is the LEGO alternate model for set 8285 tow truck, but it is enhanced by including a NXT brick and 3 motors for remotely driving,steering and (de)coupling the trailer by a wireless gamepad.The gamepad and some Java programming allow for proportional control. It is not so hard to control this model. Picking up a trailer however requires high-precision maneuvering because the trailer pin must engage in the right hole.
I applied your idea to convert rotation in translation with the worm sliding an axis with bushings, thanks for that idea:)
You can find still further info and photos at MOCpages.
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BETA for Mindsensors RCX Sensor Multiplexer
Thursday, January 17th, 2008
Mindsensors.com announced a limited beta of their new RCX Sensor Multiplexer, allowing connecting 4 RCX sensors into one digital NXT port. See here for details.
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New Contributer to NXTasy!
Thursday, January 17th, 2008Joshua Heinzl has joined our list of contributers! Here are a few words by Josh:
I live in Southern New Hampshire. My interests include: Robotics, Programming, Scuba Diving, Underwater Photography, Martial Arts, HAM Radio, Piano, Clarinet, Saxophone, Soccer, and Baseball. I am a RoboLab Alpha tester and recently attended the 2nd Annual International Lego Engineering Symposium at Tufts University. I’ve been working with Lego Robotics for 5 years. I’m currently writing a book on RoboLab. You may have seen my in the past at the 1st or 2nd RoboLab Conference in Enfield, CT, or at either of the Lego Engineering Symposiums.
Josh
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Google for Mindstorms
Saturday, January 12th, 2008Rich Hoeg sent me a link to a specialized google search page he built, which searches only Mindstorms related sites. If anyone wants to give it a try - click here.
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Pre-release version of enhanced NBC/NXC firmware
Saturday, January 12th, 2008John Hansen, who is developing an enhanced version of the NXT firmware for NBC/NXC users, published this on Lugnet:
I have uploaded a pre-release of a new enhanced NBC/NXC firmware (1.06a) which you may want to try out. It has a new arrop opcode which supports a number of useful array operations.
OPARR_SUM, OPARR_MEAN, OPARR_SUMSQR, OPARR_STD, OPARR_MIN, OPARR_MAX, and OPARR_SORT. In the case of OPARR_SORT the output parameter should be an array of the same type as the input array. In all the other cases it can be any scalar type large enough to hold the resulting value.
arrop op, dest, src, start, length
I haven’t exposed this as an official API function within NXC yet but the opcodes are added to the NBC compiler. In NXC you can use it via a simple macro wrapped around an asm block. Like so:
#define ArrayOp(_cmd, _out, _asrc, _idx, _len) asm { arrop _cmd, _out, _asrc, _idx, _len }
I’ve also optimized some array move routines which will help in places where one array is copied to another array. Testing in a tight loop where I copy a 30 element array to another 50000 times took 22.5 seconds with the standard firmware and only 7.4 seconds with the optimizations in place.
I’ve also added some new system call functions to more easily expose the FindFirst and FindNext loader module functions and other functions in that module. And I’ve wrapped the Hi-Speed IOMap stuff in some higher-level system call functions that should make interacting with that port a bit easier (and a bit faster since it doesn’t go through the IOMapRead/IOMapWrite code). I have not yet exposed these new system call functions in the NBC compiler (or in NXC) so you can’t quite use these yet. I should have a test version of NBC up this weekend which will have these functions available for use if you tell the
compiler to target the enhanced firmware.Also added to the enhanced NBC/NXC firmware are preliminary versions of functions from math.h, including acos, asin, atan, cos, sin, tan, cosh, sinh, tanh, log, log10, exp, pow, ceil, floor, sqrt, atan2, fmod, and fabs. These are preliminary since they all operate currently on integer types. The sin, cos, asin, and acos opcodes currently deal with scaled integer inputs or results (*100) and degrees instead of radians to match the existing subroutines in
NBC/NXC that Tamas Sorosy wrote. Some of the other functions use the same scale-by-100 approach as well. Could be a bug or two here also since I haven’t tested the code much yet. All of these are available in the latest build of NBC (and in NXC via asm blocks). The new test release of BricxCC will syntax highlight these new opcodes and constants when writing NBC code.http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/lms_arm_jch.zip
http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/test_release.zip
After all these additions the enhanced NBC/NXC firmware still leaves more room for user files on the NXT than the standard 1.05 firmware.
Please let me know what you think.
John Hansen
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More Custom Parts! Flexible Parts and a Custom Motor
Saturday, January 12th, 2008
Sibrecht Bouwstra, a student at the Technical University of Eindhoven, just published a project report describing custom Technic parts. Her project focused on two kinds of parts: flexible parts, which you can see in the top picture, and a motor (she wanted to make a silent, or more precisely very quiet, motor). The report describes several different methods of making flexible parts, and the picture above shows the most successful products. The motor unit includes a motor with internal gearing (using a worm gear).
Sibrecht’s web site includes a detailed illustrated project report and a movie showing the motor driving these flexible elements to create a fluid motion (click on Gallery then Lego).
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Theo Jnr
Friday, January 11th, 2008
TooMuchCaffeine has been working on this NXT walker for the NXTasy Challenge #4. Ever since I saw this movie of the works of Theo Jansen I wanted to make an NXT version. There have been a few LEGO versions allready, but I think this is the first NXT version which both walks and turns. The leg design from TMC is shown below:
TMC also put the LDD files on NXTLog here.
Good work TMC! You certainly get the 25 bonus points for original design, but I’m afraid it won’t help much with 80 seconds per turn (and a record, so far, of 20 seconds…).
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RFID sensor for NXT
Thursday, January 10th, 2008
A few people in the past have made RFID sensors for the NXT. At last, there’s an “official” third party product for those of less technical capabilities… LEGO has announced yesturday an official partnership with Codatex producing the NXT RFID Sensor seen in the above image. Some technical features frm Codatex website:
- Reads 125 kHZ transponders of type EM4102
- 5 bytes number, i.e. 240 combinations (i.e. 1.099.511.627.775 numbers)
- The reader has three modes of reading: Single read, Continuous read, Stop
- Reading distance up to 3 cm depending on transponder size and orientation
- Transparent front cap with LED signal at detection of a transponder
- Auto power off for saving battery power
- Firmware upgrade feature for future enhancements (saving hardware cost)
I’ve had a prototype of this sensor for some time, and it work very nicely - provided you place it close enough to the RFID tag and at the correct angle (RFID uses radio frequency, and the antenna has well defined spatial response). The package would contain a sensor and two tags, with holes matching Technic pegs. More details are found here.
Guy Ziv