OnBrick RC Application

From the site, “OnBrick is a 20 button programmable NXT remote controller for PDAs & PCs, using Bluetooth. Each RC button executes a user defined program - so now you can play with your NXT robots while building them. Pretty useful for testing sensors too.”

Platforms: PC (Windows XP), PDA (Windows CE/WM5)

Remove Bad Wires

Some time ago Jasonking posted on our forums an NXT-G addon that cleans bad wires from your diagram (these are the ugly black dotted lines you need to hunt sometimes in your program for it to compile).

Setup Instructions:
Copy the file RemoveBadWires.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 “Remove Bad Wires…”.

RMDPlayer

RMDPlayer is a simple Windows program which can be used to play NXT Melody files (*.rmd). It can also convert the NXT Melody file to a .wav file if desired

RobotC

RobotC by Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Academy: a C-based programming environment designed to work on the RCX, the NXT, and the VEX robot controllers

RXEDumper

RXEDumper is a simple Windows program which can be used to edit and compile Next Byte Codes (NBC) programs. It also lets you decompile NXT executable programs (.rxe, .rtm, and .sys).

It can be found at: http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/utilities.html

TestOutput Utility

Here’s a nice utility made by Julien Letrouit. It is a small on-brick program which allows control one or two motors. This can be useful to test your robots without the need to use your computer. (more…)

Tool release - NXTLogger v. 1.0 beta

I have uploaded an installer executable (notice this is a large 54Mb file due to LabView 8.2 run-time engine) which installs ‘NXTLogger’. This application, whose window is shown above, allows you to do simple data logging from the NXT to the PC (running Windows). To work with it, you must connect your NXT and your PC via Bluetooth from the NXT menus (i.e. with the NXT being the Master, and the PC being the Slave). It records data obtained from a program running on the NXT. The program can be quite simple, like the one below:

In the program I’ve simply recorded timer value. It is VERY important to set the Send BT Message to ‘Number’ instead of the default ‘Text’. When running this program, I recorded 200 seconds with 3 milisecond intervals between samples, i.e. 330 Hz.

A somewhat more elaborate (and useful) program would record also some sensor value, like the raw data from the sound sensor:

Implementing your own datalogging should be a trivial extension of these two examples.

What is the advantage over other datalogging techniques? Brian Davis has published some well documented data-logging MyBlocks which utilize the NXT filesystem. This method, however, suffers from three problems:
(1) The amount of data which it can store is limited due to the small FLASH on the NXT. This is especially painful since the file access block writes numbers as text and not binary files (so does NXTLogger, but on the PC hard drive…)
(2) It has unpredictable delays of tens of milliseconds when the NXT buffers fill up and it performs FLASH write operation
(3) It uses excessively the FLASH, which personally I hate writing/erasing without real reason… I know it should be OK for a million cycles, but why get there?

The biggest advantage of FLASH based logging, is that you don’t need an active Bluetooth connection to a PC nearby.

A user manual is in the works, but needs your comments and questions so I know what problems to address. I’ve opened a discussion topic in our forums here for this purpose.

Wav2Rso

a Windows program which can be used to convert .wav files into sound files for the NXT brick (.rso files)

Update: John Hansen has updated Wav2Rso so it can now converts both ways.