Congratulations to the Storming Robots Team SR-chitect from Branchburg New Jersery, who alerted us that they have won the RoboCup Junior US Rescue B competition and will be travelling to the World Event in June.

Elizabeth writes:

Thought you might want to know that our team won the US Rescue B and invited to compete at the World Event.    We use 2 TIRs.   A lot of work before June 18th!

Storming Robots founder and RoboClub advisor Elizabeth Mabrey said:

The RCJ Challenge demands high aptitude in abstract thinking, especially in programming the robot’s intelligence to handle variable elements on the game. It allows students to refine project outcomes over time with more sophisticated algorithms, and hardware improvement without performing similar routines every year.

The team won First Place in the US competition using the Thermal Infrared Sensor.  Congratulations to the team as they move on to the World Event in Mexico City this June!  Enjoy Mexico!

The Dexter Industries Thermal Infrared Sensor is helping teams win all over the world; see our previous entry about the Austrian RoboCup Junior Rescue Competition.

This year Dexter Industries will be partnering with Google X-Prize and LEGO MINDSTORMS to bring you the 3^rd Annual MoonBots Challenge!

Moonbots is a contest that challenges teams of students and adults to learn about robotics, the Moon, and space exploration by designing and constructing a LEGO MINDSTORMS robot that performs simulated lunar missions.

Teams will design and build LEGO MINDSTORMS robots to complete challenges similar to what explorers faced on the moon.

This year, Dexter Industries is bringing sustainability to the competition by providing 30 finalists with dSolar 4W systems.  Teams will power their lunar robots with solar power, just like a real mission to the moon! 

Registration is free and the Grand Prize is a trip to Hawaii!

Free registration and Phase One of the contest will be open from May 15^th through July 15.  Phase Two of the contest begins August 1^h through November 15^h. 

Teams from anywhere in the world are encouraged to participate.  This is a global competition and you need not be from the United States to compete!

Detailed information on the competition can be found on our website here: http://www.dexterindustries.com/moonbots.html

Here is a short video about the Moonbots 2012 competition.

Dexter Industries is partnering in the Moonbots competition by providing dSolar 4W panels for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT for the competition.  Our goal is to have real, working, solar-powered robots for this competition.  

The competition is all free!  Find out how to register for the Moonbots competition here.

Mark at Mastincrosbie.com has just released a leJOS class for the NXTBee.  The new class makes it easy to integrate wireless communications with the NXTBee into your LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT project.

The new software can be found on Marks website here:

http://mastincrosbie.com/Marks_LEGO_projects/leJOS_driver_for_NXTBee.html

Mark has done some incredible projects with the NXTBee, including his LEGO Streetview Project last year.

Ditemar writes to us about his teams recent victory in the Austrain RoboCup Junior Rescue Competition.  His team, “Austrian RoboCup Team Petersgasse” came in second and third in the Rescue B competition, using the DI Thermal Infrared Sensor for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT.  He’s been kind enough to share some pictures and videos of the competition with us . . . .

Dietmar writes:

The RoboCup Junior is a worldwide  competition of developing  robots. Seven European nations  met at the „Austrian Open 2012“ in Hohenems (Austria).

The „Austrian RoboCup Team Petersgasse“ came second and third place  in the „rescue B“ competition. The idea behind this competition is to imitate an incident in a real catastrophe case, such as searching for victims alive after an earthquake.
The robots have to move in a maze and spot heated victims through illuminated lamps. We integrated Dexter Industries sensors and were able to change the I²C address in order to use 2 sensors at 1 port simultaniously. The platform of the robot was cut by a laser cutter at the Technical University of  Graz.

We’ve been looking forward to this for a a long time.  Now one of our favorite software systems, RobotC, is combined with one of our favorite hardware systems, Arduino.

RobotC has just come out with support for the Arduino platform; now you can program your Arduino in the RobotC platform.

All of the ROBOTC features you’ve come to know and love have been brought to the Arduino, including easy motor and sensor control, the powerful ROBOTC debugger, sample program library, and many other features.

We are really looking forward to working with this and getting started with the RobotC for Arduino Platform!  Look for more soon!

RobotC for Arduino is free all summer long.  Now’s your chance to download and try it out!

Thanks to Marcelino Andrade who sent us a video and explanation of some physics demonstrations he’s doing for his students with the dIMU for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT.

Marcelino, of Universidade de Brasilia sent us a video of his project below.

Marcelino writes:

I’ve bought sensors to teach my students and introduce some concepts about IMU. I am used in a real experiments and didactic demonstrations (video:  Accelerometer /Bluetooth/Matlab) . . . The calibration method uses gravity in six orthogonal positions (Matlab code and n<100) . . . I’ve done some experience with Kalman filtering for sensor fusion (accel and gyro) and the result was more stable (graphic).

Marcelino has also sent us the Matlab and NXC code for his experiment, which can be downloaded here: http://www.dexterindustries.com/files/Andrade_Code.zip

We would love to share your projects with other folks that read our blog.  Please feel free to contact us about them!

A sneak preview of something coming soon . . .

Aswin over at Guy NXT Door has released a few sneak videos of something that will be available to the LEGO community soon.  Check out the videos below of that something!

Ashok Gadgil is an engineering professor at UC Berkeley. But in his spare time, he’s come up with solutions for water, cooking, and energy quandaries, improving lives from the Sudan to India.  We came across this fantastic article about the little known Dr. Gadgil and his inventions.

This is a great article on an engineer who has developed not one, but two things that are changing the world.  He’s working on a third.

An engineer at the University of California, his first major accomplishment was convincing developing utilities to invest in energy-saving devices.

His second project was to develop UV Waterworks, a device that supplies clean drinking water to almost 5 million people per day.  The device is super-simple and can be repaired and maintained by people in far-flung villages and produce drinkable water for mere cents.

Now Gadgil has received the  Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation  for his work  on a device that allows rural women to cook with less firewood.  It seems like a trivial device at first, but it was inspired by the plight of women in Darfur, who had to leave the safety of their camps to look for firewood and were systematically assaulted when caught.  The idea was to cut down on their need for firewood, and increase the safety of the women.

“Everybody has to be able to participate in a future that they want to live for. That’s what technology can do.”
Dean Kamen

MattAllen37 has just released an updated version of Google Weather.  This was part of our WIFI Week 2, which were a series of posts on projects for the WIFI Sensor.

The original project read weather forecasts from Google Weather, and displayed them on the NXT.  The new project uses the  DIWIFI sensor for LEGO MINDSTORMS and is in RobotC.  It has some notable improvements:

The way the original program would read the incoming data limited speed to about 9600 Baud. I like to be able to run communications faster than that, so I made some modifications to allow up to 57600 Baud.

The data provided by Google includes more than just the current conditions, temp in C and F, and wind conditions. I added several things to allow the NXT to parse and display the humidity, and the data for the next forecasted day. The debug stream outputs all this, as well as the other three forecasted days.

Get the code and check out the project here:  http://mattallen37.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/diwifi-weather-with-robotc/