Beginnings of a New Robot

Back in April I started building a robot using the old Mindstorms kit. This entailed using an RCX block which communicated through the infra-red port connected up via a serial cable. Although now archaic technology I managed to install LeJos on there and make it work.

A few months later the programs failed to download to the RCX block. I decided to upgrade to the newer model. This week the brand spanking new Mindstorms NXT 2.0 robot arrived (I am still awaiting my Java Brains book).

Before I install LeJos on this robot (and waiting for my Java Brains book, which won't be dispatched for (between) a few weeks to a month) I thought I would install the Mindstorms software and test out all the hardware.

Here are the pics, including the old and new kit:





It's nice that there's quite a few cool sensors, including a colour sensor. I remember the good ol' uni days where in the robotics class I had to build a colour sensor out of an infra-red sensor and roses sweet wrappers (that's right chocolate wrappers) and then determine what object it was by picking up the RGB values.

So my plan for the bot is to next week build the physical robot (as I didn't really have time today) and then to try and (re)program my final year Mars Rover planning system Java project into a LeJos project using a physical bot instead of being software based.