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NXT Mindstorms

Doing a side project to help out in the job at the moment for a christmas thing, and getting to play with the new NXT mindstorms kit as a result (I only used the older mindstorms kit before now in TCD). They’re much beefier on the inside, the sensors are much more polished-looking, Robolab has come on a long way (but is still a wussy way to program these things, wish I had time to blast an open source firmware to the brick), and they’re even faster to get up and running with. In 20 minutes, I had this built:

NXT Mindstorms robot

NXT Mindstorms robot

NXT Mindstorms robot

The ultrasonic sensor is a nice addition to the kits – stick that on a servo mount and you’d have a 360° sensor for mapping your environment… albiet a really noisy crappy one 😀

NXT Mindstorms robot

Ten minutes later I had Robolab installed on a WinXP virtualbox on my Debian-running laptop (sweet how far we’ve come – in the old days, I’d just have to dual-boot to get usable performance like this), and ten minutes of fiddling later, I had taught my new robot to fear me…

(You have to teach them to fear you first, otherwise they’ll turn around and shoot you in the face…)… Read the rest

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Snow in Dublin

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Sphere Within Snow"]Sphere Within Snow[/caption]

It's getting a bit chilly out there. Last time it was this cold this early in the year was 25 years ago. What was that about climate change not existing again?


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