Bluetooth NXT remote for Pocket PC

Anders Søborg published this Bluetooth NXT remote for pocket PC.
Get it here.

Bluetooth to NXT Download Utility

From the site, “A utility which can be used to download files (any, including rxe, rso, rpg) via Bluetooth from a PC to a NXT brick. There are two components: Bt2Nxt & Bt2NxtUtils.dll - both require the .NET 2 runtime.”

Download to File… in NXT-G

Jasonking posted on our forums an NXT-G addon to allow compilation of NXT-G programs to a file on the Mac/PC, rather then the usual “Compile and Download” option which downloads directly to the NXT brick.

Setup Instructions:
Copy the file DownloadToFile.llb to a directory engine/project under your NXT program directory. If this directory does not exist, create it first. Restart NXT-G software. If you followed this correctly, you should have under Tools menu an option “Download to File…”. Select it and the above window will open up. Finally, choose the path to place the compiled file and press “Download”. 

Making Music With NXT Melodies

Introduction

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.

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Microsoft Robotics Studio

NXT (and RCX) programming with C#

MIDIBatch

MIDIBatch is a simple Windows program which can be used to convert MIDI files into NXT Melody files for the NXT brick (.rmd files)

Model Differ by MP

Matthias Paul Scholz (MP) published a new tool for LDRAW, allowing comparision of two LDRAW lego models. It also allow comparision of a model with the standard retail NXT set. Why is this good for? If you want to know if a particular model can be build with the standard set, or what extra parts do you need for this.

Download from MP’s page here.

NBC - New Byte Codes

Next Byte Codes (NBC) is a simple language with an assembly language syntax that can be used to program LEGO’s NXT programmable brick

NeXTScreen: NXT display utility

John Hansen published this nice utility which allows monitoring the NXT display on the PC via USB (fast refresh) or bluetooth (slow refresh). You can configure the refresh rate and enable or disable polling. You can also set the scale from 1x to 4x. This is a standalone version of the NXT Screen tool built into BricxCC. You can download this utility here.

A second program (nextscreen2.exe) in the same archive displays the NXT screen on top of an image of the whole NXT, very useful for classroom presentations. The above image is part of the screen. Another cool feature is that pressing the NXT buttons on the PC (with the mouse) perform the same operation on the NXT itself, so you can easily show how to operate the NXT menus etc. in classroom. 

Update: Both versions now support saving .jpg and .png screenshots to your PC.

NXT Palm control software

Razix has written NXTDirector - a software for palm that allows you to remotely control NXT from a bluetooth enabled palm.

NXT Sensor Recorder

Here is a tool to record sensor readings, either as a stand alone program, as part of your own program or at the end or a program run.

nxtRICedit - PC RIC editor

Andreas Dreier made a tool enabling the creation of graphics for display on the NXT LCD. It also allow importing of several common image formats, converting them to B/W images.