This project presents a leJOS class to interface with the NXTBee, along with some sample Java code in leJOS showing how to send and receive data. I’ve written extensively about the Dexter Industries NXTBee sensor before. The NXTBee provides long-range serial wireless communication for the Lego Mindstorms NXT.
The market for Wifi drivers for the NXT is exploding - and not a moment too soon I say! Previously the only way to get your NXT to talk to the big bad Internet was to create a homebrew adapter to a wifi sensor; not a project for the faint-of-heart. But now there are three(…)
I wanted to draw a live map showing the progress of the Lego Street View car as it drove outside. The dGPS sensor does a great job of plotting the car’s location, and the NXTBee provides a perfect high-speed long-distance serial link back to my Mac at home base. But how to display a live map that is updated with the(…)
When I was developing the Lego Street View Car I realised that I needed a way to control the car more reliably than Bluetooth, and without relying on the existing of a wifi network. The NXTBee is the obvious choice. It uses the industry-standard XBee protocol giving high-speed serial transmission over a 300 ft range(…)
This is the building instructions for the Queboid Shooter robot with built-in Zamor Sphere Shooter.
The World Robot Olympiad was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE in November 2011. I was one of the fortunate LEGO fans invited along to demonstrate to the leaders of tomorrow how LEGO has no boundaries when you use your imagination. Children from all over the world came to compete in the finals for robot building(…)
My Queboid robot has been around for a while, but for the World Robot Olympiad event in Abu Dhabi this year I decided to add a Zamor sphere shooter to the basic model. I swapped out the power function motors to use NXT motors. The idea was that kids could drive the robot using Philo’s joystick design communicating over Bluetooth from(…)
You might remember the original Lego Street View Car I built in April. It was very popular at the Google Zeitgeist event earlier this year. I wanted to re-build the car to only use the Lego Mindstorms NXT motors. I was also keen to make it look more….car-like. The result, after 4 months of experimentation, is version 2.0(…)
For this project I wanted to build a webserver using the new Dexter Industries Wifi sensor for the NXT. Dexter have produced a very exciting wifi sensor that you program through the RS485 port on port 4 of your NXT. The RS485 port can communicate with the wifi sensor at speeds up to 921600 baud, so your NXT(…)
One of the biggest challenges developing programs on the NXT is fixing them when they go wrong. The NXT has a small screen with only 8 lines of text displayed. It’s difficult to know what is causing a program to fail, and to have a record of what a program did. I created this logging(…)