ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

FLL season is upon us again, so I decided to post a tool that FLL teams (and other NXT users) may find useful. This Path Measurer project for NXT 1.0 and for NXT 2.0 gives you an easy way to plot and measure a path for your NXT to travel, so that you can quickly determine how many degrees to use as the duration for your Move and Motor blocks, for the portions of your navigation that use "dead reckoning". Hopefully this will save teams some time on this more tedious task and give them more time to spend on something else, like learning how to use sensors. As most teams knows, the degrees needed for segment durations depends on the actual robot used (wheel diameter and spacing, etc.), so it is best to determine this by experimenting with your actual robot. Mechanically, the Path Measurer is just a touch sensor on a wire, which you can hook up to your robot (any robot using the normal 2-motor drive) and use it as a wired remote control to guide the movement of the robot by...