Released: RobotC Driver Suite rc1

A new release of the 3rd Party Driver Suite for RobotC is out! This version is RC1.

The obligatory Changelog:
- Driver for the new HiTechnic IR Seeker v2 (HTDIR) has been added
- Driver for the HiTechnic Compass Sensor, which I had forgotten to include with beta1 has been added
- New experimental function in the NXTCam driver to calculate the average center of all the blobs of a specific colour index.

You can download the driver and documentation from here: [LINK]
The latest documentation can be perused online here: [LINK]

Fame at last and other odds and ends

My first article on NXTasy.org has been published: [LINK]!  I’m going to be writing a series of articles for NXTasy.org about control systems and PID-control in particular.  Be sure to check back regularly for updates.

In other news: a new release of my drivers is imminent.  It will include a driver for the HT Compass, a new additional function in the NXTCam driver and another surprise, so stay tuned!

I don’t normally do this, but here’s a little comic strip that some of you programmers might enjoy.

You can read more of these here: [LINK].  Warning, can be NSFW, sometimes

Mean Lean Line Leading Machine

Several months ago I saw on the Mindsensors website that they were looking for beta testers for their upcoming Line Leader sensor.  I applied and shortly thereafter I was contacted by one of the guys there named Deepak. He told me they were still in Alpha testing phase but that they’d get back to me when they were ready to send out beta sensors.  True to their word, a few weeks later, I was the lucky recipient of one of their beta sensors. 

The Line Leader sensor is not just an array of LEDs and receivers but can actually take care of a lot of the heavy lifting usually done on your NXT.  It has a built-in PID controller that can return a value that can be used almost directly to control the speeds of your motors!  The sensor is not *just* suitable for line following, of course.  You can get all the raw data from the sensor through I2C.  That includes the average weighted value of the sensor, but also which of the 8 sensors is currently detecting something.  This makes it possible for you to use your own PID controller or use the data to navigate your robot along a line maze.

I set out to line following build a robot that could handle tight turns, so a low center of gravity was a must.  I gave it extra large wheels to be able to get a bit of extra speed.  I think the result is quite good.  Tammy took some awesome pictures of it and the sensor.

  

A track had to built to test the sensor, so I got some large thick paper sheets, white for the background and black for the lines.  I affixed the background paper to plywood for extra strength.  The program I wrote is a modified version of the one supplied by Mindsensors.  Mine allows you to tweak all the parameters (Kp, Ki, Kd and motor speed) without needing to recompile through a menu driven configuration tool.  The settings are saved when you change something and when you exit the program.

Here’s a video of the robot on the track:

The batteries were a bit flat, so I can probably make it go faster, stay tuned for more videos!

Here is a link to the program, it requires RobotC 1.40+: [LINK].