ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Xander made a nice post on his all new website , about the New RobotC 3.0 release. Many of you might know him as the creator of the driver suite for all the new (non LEGO) sensors in the RobotC platform. The new RobotC has many improvements, including an virtual test landscape. But that’s not all! Xander has 75 ROBOTC 3.0 annual single-seat licenses for the Mindstorms NXT platform to give away! (read the full article and instructions for requesting a license here . Martyn

Willow Garage seems to be a really cool place to work at -- if you remember the video of the PR2 robot fetching a cold one from the fridge you'll know what i mean -- and with the recently announced NXT-ROS software stack, based on NXT-Python, their days now include playing with LEGO Mindstorms!  Check out the recent announcement here: Willow Garage recently announced that it designed code to link the popular Lego Mindstorms NXT to the formidable Robot Operating System (ROS) Once a robot is connected to ROS, you can start running applications such as the base controller, wheel odometry, keyboard/joystick teleoperation, and even assisted teleoperation using the ROS navigation stack. The NXT-ROS software stack includes a number of example robot models for users to play with and to get a feel for using NXT with ROS. One part that caught my attention is the use of  LEGO LDD files in ROS’s 3D visualization display. If any of you have tried out this package plea...

I recently came across this on Youtube. and the second part, that shows you how to setup the enviroment. This seems really interesting, and I think could be a big help to FLL teams... if anyone tries it, let us (or the poster at least) know how it goes! Happy New Year to everyone, Richard

When I was in a LEGO Education Center in Shanghai, I met a true LEGO MINDSTORMS enthusiast, Johnson - it instant friendship. He showed some of the projects he developed and one really caught my attention: NXT-G Online. This software helps teach people how to program in NXT-G through a virtual programming teaching environment. In other words, you have a mission to solve, then you write your NXT-G code then download it to a virtual NXT robot (that is what really caught my attention), which runs the program and accomplishes the mission. It is also VERY easy to use. This software is also a great solution for schools/groups who cannot afford NXT's for everyone, but want them to all have an equal opportunity to program an NXT to really do some tasks. Here is a video showing NXT-G Online: To help better understand what is going on in the video, here is the sequence of chronologically events: - A challenge was selected - a video that came up introduced the challenge. - The simulated NXT-...