Archive for the 'mindstorms nxt' Category

LabVIEW for MINDSTORMS book in the works

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Michael Aivaliotis
on June 16, 2008
in Books, LabVIEW and mindstorms nxt
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There is a new Mindstorms NXT book currently in production by Michael Gasperi that focuses on using LabVIEW to program your robot. I’m excited about this for obvious reasons. I’m a strong advocate of using LabVIEW in just about everything and of course the popular Lego robot is no exception. NXT-G has LabVIEW at the core, but it has a very limited subset of the entire language.

LabVIEW for MINDSTORMS was written by an expert in LEGO MINDSTORMS with the cooperation of National Instruments to create the definitive guide to programming the NXT using LabVIEW. See Author Bio

Using the robotic construction projects included with the retail Lego Mindstorms NXT product the author shows how advanced tools from the LabVIEW Toolkit can be used to build more versatile and complicated designs. Several new projects of a more laboratory or industrial nature are also included to show computer control with the NXT as a data acquisition and control device. Advanced NXT topics like Data Files, Bluetooth, and I2C communications are also treated as well as how to connect the NXT to the internet with a web server.

The book is further set apart by its packaging. Enclosed with each new book is a CD containing the LabVIEW 8.5 demo version, the LabVIEW Toolkit, and all the programming examples from the book. Everything you need to enhance and extend your robotic design.

Michael Gasperi is an authority and a well known author of several LEGO MINDSTORMS books. His popular website, LEGO Mindstorms NXT/RCX Sensor Input Page, homebrew sensor chapters in the Extreme MINDSTORMS, and his Extreme NXT book have guided hundreds people through the process of building hardware extensions and programming in alternative languages.

Resources:

See Also:

High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza

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Michael Aivaliotis
on May 31, 2008
in mindstorms nxt
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In this event sponsored by National Instruments and others, participants will send Lego NXT and RCX kits into the stratosphere:

To help commemorate the 10th anniversary of LEGO® Mindstorms®, Nevada Space Grant, the University of Nevada-Reno, National Instruments, The Energizer Battery Company, and the LEGO Mindstorms Team will be conducting the High Altitude LEGO Extravaganza.

H.A.L.E is an event that will carry up to 15 LEGO Mindstorms-based payloads into the Earth’s stratosphere. At that altitude H.A.L.E. will be above 99.9% of the atmosphere. They payloads will be exposed to extreme the cold and radiation of near space. The sky looks black and the curvature of the Earth is evident. Individuals and teams from all around the world are busy designing and building payloads for this historic event.

All payloads will be NXT and/or RCX controlled. Some teams will be flying cameras. Some will be flying scientific experiments. Most, importantly, every team will be having fun.

H.A.L.E. will take place in Reno, NV between July 28-August 2 (exact date to be announced and contingent on weather - check this website for updates as the date approaches).

The launch vehicle consists of an atmospheric weather balloon and a communication system to track the payloads. Once the balloon reaches approximately 30 km in altitude, it ruptures and the payloads return to the ground under parachute.

Projected minimum altitude: 27 km (88,000 feet)
Projected maximum altitude 33 km (108,000 feet)

How to take awesome photos of your NXT creations

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Michael Aivaliotis
on March 15, 2008
in mindstorms nxt
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I was the first to mentioned in a previous post about the great NXT website called nxtprograms.com. One distinct feature of the site is the crystal clear photos of the robots. Well, you too can take great photos of your own creations. The creator of the site has put up some tutorials on how to take photos just like the ones on the site.


Website: How to Take Good Photos of LEGOs

NXT-G Online: A Virtual Programming Teaching Environment

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Michael Aivaliotis
on March 14, 2008
in Robotics and mindstorms nxt
. 2 Comments

NXT-G Online is software that allows you to program a virtual Lego Mindstorms NXT. Are you a school that doesn’t have enough cash for an NXT hardware set. No fear, this virtual software actually lets you program in NXT-G and download to a virtual NXT brain. Then you can execute the code and see it in virtual action.




To help better understand what is going on in the video, here is the sequence of chronologically events:

  • A challenge was selected - a video that came up introduced the challenge.
  • The simulated NXT-G programming environment was opened
  • Wrote some code (4 motor blocks were dragged onto the palette, and each was set at a different power level).
  • Downloaded the NXT-G program to the virtual NXT robot, which automatically opened the virtual environment.
  • The robot was moved to where we wanted it to start.
  • The virtual NXT brick was opened and we ran the program that was just created. The robot moved accordingly.

Note that the release version of NXT-G Online also has the ability select different sensors and motors for the virtual robot after which you can go back and change your code to make use of your modifications.

Source: The NXT STEP - LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Blog

Braintech demonstrates vision SDK for Microsoft Robotics Studio

Published
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Michael Aivaliotis
on February 10, 2008
in Robo Development 2007, Robotics and mindstorms nxt
. 2 Comments

Download Video
Braintech demonstrates Volts-IQ to VI Shots.

Braintech’s VOLTS-IQ Visual Intelligence Software Suite provides feature recognition, object localization and robot guidance in the form of Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) services.

VOLTS-IQ uniquely combines Braintech’s proven robot vision expertise with Microsoft’s powerful MSRS service-based architecture. Using VOLTS-IQ, researchers, commercial product developers and hobbyists can “vision-enable” their robotic projects and products with unprecedented ease and speed, leap frogging the traditional barriers involved with vision development and bringing their ideas to life faster than ever.

Resources mentioned in this video:

Expanding Mindstorms NXT with LabVIEW

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Michael Aivaliotis
on February 4, 2008
in LabVIEW, Robo Development 2007 and mindstorms nxt
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National Instruments continuously works closely with Lego to expand virtual instrumentation into the classroom by developing LabVIEW integration with their Mindstorms NXT platform. In this latest VI Shots video we see a demo of an NI product acquired from Hyperception, the Speedy-33. We see how the Speedy-33 combined with a HiTechnic interface can integrate LabVIEW signal processing algorithms to move an NXT based on audio frequencies.

Resources mentioned in Video:

Steve Hassenplug - Mindstorms NXT holonomic drive robot.

Published
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Michael Aivaliotis
on December 6, 2007
in NIWeek 2007 and mindstorms nxt
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Steve Hassenplug was there from the beginning when Lego decided to revamp the old RCX platform. He was part of the Mindstorms User Panel (MUP) which was extensively covered in a Feb 2006 Wired magazine article. He was later invited to participate in the Mindstorm Developer Program (MDP) where he built a holonomic drive robot called Omni. This latest version which he shows off in the video uses a compass sensor to keep on track to it’s destination.

Jay Kinzie - Lego Mindstorms NXT MCP

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Michael Aivaliotis
on November 14, 2007
in mindstorms nxt
. 2 Comments


Quicktime

Jay Kinzie - Lego Mindstorms NXT innovator Jay Kinzie is an avid Lego Mindstorms fan, he contributes to the NXT STEP blog and is a participant in FLL competitions. He is also a MINDSTORM Community Partner (MCP). Jay showed us some of his creations at NIWeek 2007 this past August.

Jay is also a freshman mechanical engineering student at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Jay caught the entrepreneurial spirit at 15 years old and has formed Jbotics Innovations LLC (www.jbotics.com) to leverage his ideas related to internal combustion engines and transmission designs. He currently is pursuing 41 patents on a variety of products. Some of his transmission designs are built into his Lego robots.

Chris Anderson hates graphical programming

Published
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Michael Aivaliotis
on November 12, 2007
in mindstorms nxt
. 6 Comments

Chris Anderson at NIWeekSo Chris Anderson the Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine did the final keynote presentation at NIWeek 2007 this past August. I was really excited about this since up to the run up to NIWeek I had managed to purchase and read his book, The Long Tail. I was also eager to get him to sign it, which I managed to do.

Chris did an amazing job in the keynote of describing his involvement with the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics system and how he created a UAV which was controlled by the NXT. This is marketing gold for LEGO and an inspiration to all, young and old as to what can be accomplished with a few low cost LEGO parts and a cell phone. He mentioned how his 9 year old son programmed the NXT using the NXT-G graphical programming language (which we all know is really LabVIEW in disguise).

I left that keynote feeling happy and all geeked out because, hey, when it really comes down to it, the Editor-in-chief of Wired magazine is using LabVIEW! How cool is that?

Well, not so cool it turns out. Chris just posted on his geekdad blog that Robot C is “The Best Programming Language for Lego Mindstorms” I mean, c’mon Chris, really? Can you seriously tell us that a 9 year old kid will jump for joy when you show her a screen full of this? Give me a break. I’m beginning to wonder if you’ve turned from a geek dad to simply a geek. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that this intended for kids. No, really it is. The biggest challenge we have as parents is to find ways to pull our children away from various mind numbing distractions onto something useful. Showing them pages of C code is not one of them.

In this video my 8 year old son built and programmed the NXT claw on his own. I mentioned to him that he was programming in LabVIEW and he was surprised. He was surprise because he thought LabVIEW was this complicated software that only dad knew how to use and was for automating complicated machinery he knew nothing of. This is the whole point. He was able to build the mechanics and write the automation program without writing one line of code.

The future is not C or text based programming languages. The future is graphical programming. Chris mentions several times that it’s time to use a “real programming language”. I agree. This is why we should all be programming the NXT using LabVIEW. See, LabVIEW is a real programming language and contains all the things that Chris misses in NXT-G. LabVIEW has “if…then…else”, “while”, even “for…next”. It also has sophisticated debugging tools. Can it rise up to the challenge? Well, if Virginia Tech uses it for DARwIn and the DARPA challenge then I’m sure it will work on the poor little NXT brain. Oh, and if the cost is too high, there’s always LabVIEW Student Edition.

Edit: LAVA has picked up the discussion here.

New LEGO NXT project website, answers question: “Where do I go from here?”

Published
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Michael Aivaliotis
on November 12, 2007
in mindstorms nxt
. 3 Comments

I just got wind of this cool NXT website through one of the FLL group lists I’m subscribed to, nxtprograms.com.

nxtprograms.com

Dave Parker, the founder of nxtprograms.com says about his new site:

I started this web site in response to feedback that I have heard over and over from parents of kids at our school: They got an NXT set for Christmas, had fun building the one or two sample robots, and now they are having trouble figuring out what to do with it, either due to lack of building experience (especially with the studless NXT style parts), lack of knowledge of any programming, or simply a lack of ideas that are fun but simple enough to do. Lack of programming knowledge, in particular, is a big barrier to most kids and severely limits what you can do with your NXT set. I have also found that most kids don’t have the patience to learn any programming lesson-style during their free time, so this site takes a different approach. There are no programming lessons, but instead there are a variety of free, fully commented sample programs that go along with various fun projects that the kids can simply download and use as it, then perhaps some will be motivated to learn more about how they work by studying the programs. Those of us who have studied any programming know that many times the best way to learn it is by seeing concrete examples. In addition, by following the building instructions for the projects, the kids will also learn various ways of building with the NXT parts.

I have to agree that figuring out where to go next after you have built the included bots is a challenge. My favorite part about the site is the super crisp detailed pictures of the assembly process. All programs are included on the site for free. As an added bonus, at the end of the project page there is a challenges section that gives you ideas on how to expand the project.