May 2008

New FIRST robotics controller – Interviews and Opinions

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    The big announcement this year at the FIRST robotics finals in Atlanta was the new robot controller from National Instruments. This new controller called cRIO runs a real-time OS and can be programmed using LabVIEW. The power of this new technology will open the door for new and more interesting challenges for future [...]

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LabVIEW powered “Flexstack” iRobot Create reads RFID tags

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    Boston Engineering decided to demonstrate their FlexStack product by attaching it to an iRobot Create programmable robot, have it scan RFID tags and then make it do several dances. FlexStack is powered by LabVIEW Embedded. Take a look at this original VI Shots video.

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Justin reviews the OLPC and reveals some cool applications

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Roving VI Shots corespondent and LAVA member Justin Goeres participated in the “buy one get one” program that the OLPC foundation announced last year. This is where you spend $400 and you donate one laptop to a child in an impoverished nation and in return you get one laptop for yourself. I caught up with [...]

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NITRO – Ball shooting cRIO powered FIRST Robotics demo bot

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Another video taken at the FIRST final competition of 2008 in Atlanta. NI built a robot called NITRO to demonstrate the powerful capabilities of the new cRIO controller that will be used by the competition teams this year. In addition to a cool ball shooting mode, NITRO has some advanced image analysis capabilities. Here we [...]

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