NXT Compatible Sockets and Plugs
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007
For a long time, the NXT style RJ12 plugs and sockets were unavailable in market. They are now sold by mindsensors.com. The order page is here (it is not accessible from their main webpage for some reason).
Posted in hardware, news, hacking | 2 Comments »
I2C Interfacing Part 2: Analog-to-Digital, Pressure Sensing, and 5V Power
Saturday, December 30th, 2006
A pressure sensor allows you to stop a motor that operates a Lego pneumatic compressor when the pressure is high enough to actuate pneumatic cylinders and to start it when the pressure is too low. This prototype sensor uses an analog pressure sensor chip to measure pressure. The analog measurement is converted to a digital value and sent to the NXT using an I2C analog-to-digital converter chip. A slight complication is caused by the pressure sensor, which needs a 5V power supply. But thanks to I2C, the sensor is still very simple.
The full details are available here.
Posted in hardware, hacking | 3 Comments »
Wii Will Hack You?!
Saturday, December 2nd, 2006
Word on the streets is that the Nintendo Wii is a blast to play. Its innovative wireless motion-sensing controller (the Wiimote) is revolutionizing the video gaming experience.
Sure enough, hackers have been dissecting the hardware to reveal what lies beneath all the pretty plastic as soon as they got their paws on the system. It seems Nintendo didn’t disclose too many details about the technology behind the Wiimote, so it was only recently discovered that it’s actually a Bluetooth-compliant device capable of communicating with devices other than the Wii. Great news for us, wouldn’t you say!? Imagine wirelessly controlling the arms of your robot with the physical motions of your own arms. Sure, we’ve seen a gesture-based application for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT, but this takes it to another dimension — literally!
Do any of our readers own a Wii? Anybody up for the challenge of creating the first Wiimote NXT application? I’m sure the NXT community, and even the rest of the tech world, would be interested in seeing it. Good luck!
Here are a few resources to get you started:
Wiimote Technical Guide
Video of Wiimote acceleration reading on a PC
Posted in video, hardware, news, knowledge, hacking | 8 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 »
Adding your own robots into NXT-G Robo Center/Robot Educator
Friday, October 27th, 2006
Motivated by a question posted by ahdavidson on our forums, I set out to unravel the details of NXT-G Robo Center/Robot Educator file structure. In a detailed review I posted to NXTasy repository, I describe the details and the instructions how to add your own contents into Robo Center/Robot Educator.
I’ve opened a thread in our forum for discussion on this review here.
Posted in news, software, hacking | No Comments »
Making Music With NXT Melodies
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006Introduction
I want to first thank Eric and Guy for letting me join the nxtasy team. I’ve been impressed for quite some time by the amazing content and community being built here and I wanted to be a small part of it.
And now on to the subject at hand - making music!
Playing Sounds
A very popular feature of the standard NXT firmware is the ability to play wave files which have been converted into NXT sound files (with an .rso extension). The NXT software comes with many sounds which can be used in an NXT-G or NBC program with the standard NXT firmware to make your robot sound cool. Using a wave file to NXT sound file conversion utility you can easily create additional sounds for use in NXT-G and NBC programs.
Unfortunately, even though NXT sound files are fairly low quality (8-bit, mono, 8k sample rate) sounds, they can take up large amounts of flash memory when they are used in a program. The “Writing Efficient NXT-G Programs” pdf document on the First Lego League website recommends that you “minimize use of Sound and Display blocks” in order to more optimally use the available flash memory. With flash memory limited to around 128 kilobytes it can be very important to pay close attention to how much space is taken up by sound files.
Posted in development, firmware, knowledge, hacking, Programming, Utilities, Alt.NXT-G | 34 Comments »
“NI Week” Trip Report
Friday, August 11th, 2006NI Week is National Instruments annual sales conference held in Austin, TX. There was a very strong LEGO and Mindstorms flavor at this year’s conference with several significant Mindstorms announcements. There was great attendance by many influential people in the Mindstorms community.
The contents of this post include not only the “formal” NI Week activities but also describe advanced Mindstorms “sensor” technologies that I was quietly demonstrating at NI week — including interfaces to a wireless SONY Playstation Controller and (an almost complete) video camera connected to the NXT high speed sensor port.
Posted in hardware, news, hacking, events | 6 Comments »
What’s A NXT IOMAP?
Saturday, August 5th, 2006This is a high level overview of the NXT I/O MAPs (IOMAPs). It’s compiled from information scattered among the recently released Development Kits (DKs). Many third party environments will require that developers have a good knowledge of the IOMAPs to do advanced NXT programming.
Posted in development, firmware, knowledge, hacking | No Comments »
Get Your Hack On! Dev Kits Released!
Tuesday, August 1st, 2006It’s August 1! The official open source firmware development kits have been released for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT! Discuss in our forums!
Per the site:
The Software Developer Kit includes the NXT driver interface specification and necessary tools for creating third-party programming environments. The Hardware Developer Kit provides schematics and details for the NXT 6-wire digital connector system, enabling users to design and develop third-party sensors that can interact with and control the NXT motors and intelligent brick. The Bluetooth Developer Kit details the Bluetooth protocol embedded in the NXT microprocessor, allowing users to create applications for any Bluetooth device to communicate with MINDSTORMS robots.
Posted in development, firmware, news, hacking | 3 Comments »