Recently Dexter Industries teamed up with the University of Arizona to bring solar powered robots to engineering teaching.  Students are getting hands-on learning experience in solar engineering using the dSolar to power their LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. A teaching concept that lets students power up Lego robots by retrofitting them with mini solar panels is making its way out of...

We recently wanted to distance test the NXTBee.  In this post, we review some of the distance results of testing the distance of the NXTBee XBee radios for LEGO MINDSTORMS. The NXTBee has some major advantages over the Bluetooth module found on the LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT.  The advantages include:

Thanks to everyone who participated in our contest last week! We had some fabulous ideas that included . . .

Improvements

When you have to read the gyroscope fast . . .

We just received a new book from Brian Bagnall: Intelligence Unleashed. I, John, personally, have been eagerly awaiting the book because I've been wanting an excuse to learn the JAVA programming language for a long time.

Multirobot Communication Examples from Robotics Academy using the NXTBees and Lego Mindstorms NXT. Great videos!

The Dexter Industries Inertial Motion Sensor: a gyroscope and accelerometer. Six degrees of freedom and no limits.

The NXTBee has evolved . . . . still blue and still better than bluetooth.

A lookup table is a way to put a checksum into a transmission. Rather than calculate out the checksum, a lookup table operates much faster.