Programming the Bot

My little brother was eager to program the bot, so I thought I'd give it a little whirl with the Mindstorms software. I got him to program it using the Mindstorms software:

 

And here is the video .

NXT Bot: Building the Chassis

I've just spent the past 2 hours building the chassis for my robot. I still need to put LeJos on my laptop and then onto the NXT block before I can start programming it. If I get the chance, I will do that tomorrow.

Here is the progress:

 

 

 

Next week I will be enhancing it in terms of a claw for gripping and then putting sensors on for object detection.

It has been a very productive robotics day :D

LeJos Setup

Courtesy of Mike Brook (aka @FrozenKnight on twitter)

Helpful links for getting LEJOS setup with your NXT brick.

Make sure you download all the latest updates from the Lego Mindstorms Tech Support pages (get the 1.02 version driver, and the fix for Mac OSX 10.5+) http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/support/files/Driver.aspx

How to install LEJOS onto Mac running OSX 'Snow Leopard' http://lejos.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1696&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Getting NetBeans setup to compile and upload your programs http://lejos.sourceforge.net/nxt/nxj/tutorial/Preliminaries/CompileAndRun.htm

Read this post if you have problems with compile and upload http://lejos.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1696&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15

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.