I did it. After uselessly going to Sears (losers, they have nothing) and Toys-r-us (Downtown Toronto location closed, worse losers), I finally found an NXT box, way up there on the top shelf at an obscure toy store. It was overpriced compared to Lego's online store but I didn't care. Who can wait for delivery.
Built the first sample robot as soon as I got home. My 12 year old daughter, which to my great shame has never played with the Lego kits I bought for her when she was younger, couldn't keep her hands off my new toy. I sure told her off. If she wants to play with Lego robots, she can join the friggin' Lego club at school!
No programming yet...
Tuesday, May 1st, 2007
Added the light sensor to the front and wrote a line following program. Not a big fan of Visual Programming. Researched options a bit and decided to try RobotC. leJOS seemed interesting but it looks like it's not quite ready yet. I'll try it for sure later. My other option was NBC/NXC which was close to RobotC. What did it was Steve Hassenplug's NXT development environment comparison. RobotC is way fast, plus the debugger is nice. I'll try it and see if it's worth 30 bucks.
Wednesday, May 2nd, 2007
Couldn't wait any longer.
Friday, May 4th, 2007
Installed RobotC and updated my Firmware. Looked at Philo's program written in NBC and quickly adapted it to RobotC. Robot falls faster than on the movies. Need to play with the various constants.
I'm not too sure about this light sensor. It's all right, but as soon as the surface changes, it's bye-bye robot. Not to mention hills.
To make a long story short, I ordered the accelerometer sensor which supposedly also reports the tilt in three axis. I also ordered a rechargeable battery pack 'cause I'm going thru batteries like their going out of style. Unfortunately, they are back ordered so my order is delayed, pending the battery pack. Aaaaarg! I'll keep playing with the light sensor in the mean time.
Sunday, May 6th, 2007
My brain is mush. I have been trying to comprehend Ryo's Mathematical Model of the NXTWay-G.
Did you know that:
That's the kind of crazy stuff that's involved. And this is a simple one. How on earth am I supposed to know the moment of inertia of my robot's body? Do I need it?
I'm going to maintain a an annotated model that describes what I find out as I progress.
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