Finally! My robot is ‘working’!

Unfortunately working is in quotes there because the little guy (it was RZero from the previous vids) is actually in about 5 pieces on my desk at the moment. The reason for this is because I was trying to diagnose an annoying problem with the motors that was causing them to brake and use up the batteries really quickly. In the end it turned out that the motor were actually being set to hard brake instead of coast like I wanted and switching a few parameters in my dev environment fixed it all up (also I have a feeling my first lot of batteries were out of date or something because they died in less than a day!)

Speaking of dev environments, I have switched from RobotC to C# and so far it is great. I am using the NXT# library ( available here: http://lego.fokke.net/ ) which allows me to access all of the sensors and motors over the bluetooth link to the NXT from Visual Studio on my main PC.

I really like the idea of building stupid robot ‘avatars’ for my computer and keeping the processing power on the main PC. Sure your robot can’t operate out of Bluetooth range but if it had onboard processing it would be nearly useless anyway unless its task was to wander around aimlessly avoiding walls. The PC can now use the droid as a sensory platform and apply its billions of otherwise wasted cycles mapping and navigating the room. Not to mention the sensor fusion possibilities! (Must. develop. ultimate. thingy.)

I’ll hopefully have some time later in the week to get Backslash (that is its name now – think of the Transformer naming scheme – it has a new mind so it gets a new name) back together and wandering around again. This time under the thrall of the house computer… (cue Transformers theme music or something