Brick Labs

Some neat bits about RobotC

1) Convert Ringtones to RobotC code

http://tinkernology.blogspot.com/2010/07/ringtone-converter-for-robotc.html

2) Using a temperature sensor… has some great tips

http://tinkernology.blogspot.com/2010/07/ringtone-converter-for-robotc.html

3) Arduino Alternative?

http://mightor.wordpress.com/2010/06/24/the-new-arduino-alternative/

At TEDxNASA, Dennis Hong introduces seven award-winnning, all-terrain robots — like the humanoid, soccer-playing DARwIn and the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR — all built by his team at RoMeLa, Virginia Tech. Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab’s incredible technical success.

Cool video… some great intro’s to some of these robots… Google the robot for more details.  :)

Right around 12:23 – Dennis talks about how he gets some of his ideas.  What I find amazing, isn’t the fact that he keeps a journal by his bed, to write down ideas he gets while trying to sleep (lots of folks have done that…. Dennis has a cool LED pen he uses to not wake-up the wife).  What I find amazing, is that he talks about what he does with those ideas afterwards.  Some ideas are junk… sometimes his journal is blank.  Sometimes… he has a nugget. 

Watch the video to find out what he does with that nugget…

Damien Kee posted a nice bit over at The NXT Step on how to setup custom graphics for your MyBlocks.

Damien has the full tutorial on how to do this on the NXT Step site…

Even the yellow ones…

Cool looking robot.  Called the HoverBot 3K.

Full building instructions included.

About two years after Sandro built the HoverBot 3K instructions are now available. Feel free to use them. We would be happy if you
posted a picture of your own HoverBot 3K.

Apparently, it was originally built by his 8 year old son, with no help from Dad.  Impressive!

It uses some neat building ideas, without using any headlight bricks too.

v1.4 of the RobotC Driver Suite has been released. You can download it here: RobotC Driver Suite v1.4

Details of the release are found here at Xanders Blog.

I’m in the processing of trying it out, and working my way through some RobotC samples. Especially for using the HiTechnic Experimenters board.

This example takes the project from Example 2, and replaces the potentiometer with a sound sensor from LEGO.

Here is the project (same exact one from the prior example).

And here is the robot with the attached sound sensor.  Please note… I’ve only put the sound sensor in this location since the robot isn’t actually driving.  If it was going to be driving, I’d probably not bother with the sound sensor.  They are notorious for picking up the sound of the motors.

This time, everything worked perfect.  The LEDs almost pulse in time to your speaking, which is a neat effect.

My son came in to see what was going on.  He near broke my eardrum trying to get a nice loud noise to spike the LEDs.  Loud claps less than 6 inches from your ear tend to hurt.

This project was a very simple one.  I didn’t have to do any debugging or tweaking, since it just worked.

Example 5 deals with a home-made light sensor.  Should be a good project for tomorrow.