ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

This week's Robot Inspiration might sound a little advanced: make a robot that interacts with the computer. However, this can actually be quite easy, while opening up a host of new applications. As I posted about here and here , you can use RoboRealm to easily make robots interact with the computer in a variety of ways. Now RoboRealm has added more computer capability to their software. Keyboard: Besides taking input from the keyboard, you can make a robot control the keyboard. In other words, I could have my robot write a post on this blog! In terms of taking input from the keyboard, here's a video of a "NXT Messenger" I made using RoboRealm. With the range of BT, I can type a message up here in my room, and my mom can read it in the kitchen, two floors down, on the NXT brick! (sorry for the low quality of the NXT screen... putting the video in the blogger player made it much harder to read the text on the NXT screen) Mouse: Now RoboRealm lets you get the coordinat...

Jan emailed the following: "We have our new video, images and source code online, showing the NXT tracked rover being controlled with an XBox 360 controller through RoboRealm software. The building instructions for this robot will be up in the next couple of days, but the setup works with any differential drive NXT bot." Check it all out here .

Here's the video of my rover being controlled by the keyboard... something you can see in the video that I didn't mention in my post is that I mounted my wireless camera on a motor, and can pan it up and down using the Page Up and Page Down keys - this lets me see more when using the camera to navigate. One thing I noticed after making this robot is that controlling it from the keyboard feels like playing a very realistic video game. :P -Jonathan P.S. Another thing I did with the keyboard function is make a NXT Messenger. I can type a message on my keyboard up in my room and someone can read it two floors down on my NXT display screen. :-)