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:

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

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…)

Dagda, the robot I spent several years of my PhD building - this post is on the cameras and computer system on the robot.

Or, as I first said on watching this, “Holy *****….”

I mean, myself and Ian Dowse built a micromouse robot once, way back in the mists of prehistoric time, but, well…

It wasn’t exactly going to finish in 4.766 seconds, you know?

And it certainly didn’t look as slick as Tetra did:

Makes you wish there was money and facilities for doing robotics hardware in an Irish college, doesn’t it? I mean, look at it, the sheer elegant efficiency of the design, the purpose to it – the PCB extends out in front to put the weight on the front drive wheels so that it’s fast when turning, and the rear wheels come into play when it’s accelerating forward – it’s very elegant minimalist design, mechanically. We just never had the money, facilities, tools or other necessary things to do that sort of work