In this HowTo, we’ll show you how to get your EV3 and your Arduino to communicate, and how to use Arduino Shields with the EV3. The EV3 is much more powerful than the NXT, but at the time of writing this article, the software available is much harder to hack with.  We recently tried to make this easier by developing...

Since we first got the Raspberry Pi, we have wanted to make a robot out of it.  There aren’t many kits out there yet that let you do that (yet).  This HowTo Raspberry Pi Project shows you how we hacked together a motor controller from the Raspberry Pi and used it to control LEGO MINDSTORMS Motors. The LEGO MINDSTORMS...

In this HowTo, we’ll show you how to get your LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT and your Arduino to talk. In the demonstration, we use an Arduino Uno, but the example we’ve written can be used for just about any of the versions of Arduino.  This example can be extended to use the Arduino as a sensor for the NXT, and...

We’ve written previously about connecting LEGO MINDSTORMS I2C sensor to the Raspberry Pi. This is another sensor post: how to get an NXT Touch Sensor working with the Raspberry Pi. Unlike the dIMU in our previous post, this sensor does not use digital communications like I2C. Rather it’s a simple on/off GPIO. Wait, what’s a GPIO? The acronym stands...

This is a quick tutorial to show how we hooked up a dIMU (An Accelerometer and Gyroscope for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT) to a Raspberry Pi.  This is a quick How-To, that assumes you have a Raspberry PI with a Raspbian image on it (If you don’t have Raspbian, you can check out this fantastic tutorial on how to get...

This howto demonstrates how the Solar Panel adapter for the dSolar can be used to power the NXTBee Pro or the WIFI.  One might want to use this setup to power a long-range vehicle or autonomous vehicle that communicates information back to a computer or another NXT. First up, you’ll need a few items. 9v battery wire: RJ-45 cable...

So you have ROBOTC installed on your computer and are ready to program your LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, but you need a debugging technique to find possible run time errors in your program? The 3 most common ways to do this in ROBOTC are: Add tones and sounds to your program code, and from the sound determine which part of...

This is a step-by-step guide to downloading and installing 3rd Party NXT-G blocks for use in the NXT-G Software.  This tutorial will walk you through how to download and install 3rd party NXT-G Blocks (software provided by non-LEGO companies for the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT).  Dexter Industries has programmed several blocks for use in NXT-G. You can also see our...

This is a quick Labview tutorial on how to use the NXTBee in the LVLM Environment.  There are two major steps to getting started with the NXTBee in Labview for LEGO MINDSTORMS: Upgrade the firmware. Install the test files. Upgrading the Firmware on the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. The LVLM environment comes with its own firmware.  However, the current release...

Sensors of the world unite!  You have nothing to lose but your 9V batteries! We’ve been working on our Wifi sensor for the Mindstorms NXT all summer.  Because the work requires a lot of programming, we’ve been burning through 9V batteries really rapidly. Xander worked out a hack for this a few months back where he used a wall...