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New Toy…

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New Toys!Robotics

Way back in the mists of time, I mentioned how we had laser scanners in the CVRG (one of which was mounted on Dagda for a while). We used the SICK for a long while, which is a block of steel that’s pretty adept at toe crushing, only scanned through a partial circle and was enormously expensive (and later we acquired a 3D scanner which was even more expensive but could at least do 360 degrees). That was fifteen years ago though. 

Meet the modern version: 

The YDLIDAR X4, evolved from roomba sensors and possibly a knockoff of a slightly more well-known sensor. Weighs next to nothing, costs $80, fits in the palm of your hand, scans through 360 degrees seven times a second taking 5000 samples in the process (so about half-degree resolution), ranges out to ten meters on a good day with a following wind. … Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 2 Comments

NXT Mindstorms

GeneralRobotics

Doing a side project to help out in the job at the moment for a christmas thing, and getting to play with the new NXT mindstorms kit as a result (I only used the older mindstorms kit before now in TCD). They’re much beefier on the inside, the sensors are much more polished-looking, Robolab has come on a long way (but is still a wussy way to program these things, wish I had time to blast an open source firmware to the brick), and they’re even faster to get up and running with. In 20 minutes, I had this built:

NXT Mindstorms robot

NXT Mindstorms robot

NXT Mindstorms robot

The ultrasonic sensor is a nice addition to the kits – stick that on a servo mount and you’d have a 360° sensor for mapping your environment… albiet a really noisy crappy one 😀

NXT Mindstorms robot

Ten minutes later I had Robolab installed on a WinXP virtualbox on my Debian-running laptop (sweet how far we’ve come – in the old days, I’d just have to dual-boot to get usable performance like this), and ten minutes of fiddling later, I had taught my new robot to fear me…

(You have to teach them to fear you first, otherwise they’ll turn around and shoot you in the face…)… Read the rest

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Mark Dennehy in 3 Comments