About

My name is Xander Soldaat. I am a Linux project engineer by day and robot scientist by night. The transformation usually occurs right after I come home from work, which is technically still afternoon. In any case, I like to build robots.

Ever since I was a kid I was fascinated by them. I built many contraptions with Technic Lego and electronics. I guess I’ve been playing with Technic Lego since I was about 6 or so and I still have all of it.

My reintroduction to robotics started in 2007 or so when I bought a Parallax BoeBot kit with a few sensors.  After a while I had learned all I could from the Basic Stamp 2 based Board of Education (BoE), and moved on to the Parallax Propeller. This much more powerful microcontroller has 8 cores and runs at a staggering 80MHz. Parallax’s Propeller Proto Board has the exact same mounting holes as the BoE, allowing you to use it pretty much as a drop-in (with some minor modifications) on your Boe-Bot. Now you have a robot that can do so much more. Not bad for a $20 upgrade. I have a large array of sensors that I can hook up to the robot, digital compass, 2D accelerometer, wheel encoders and the PING)) ultrasonic sensor with rotation servo.

In February 2008 I purchased a Lego Mindstorms NXT set. Powered by an ARM7 microcontroller it is a very different beast from anything I’ve programmed before. The Lego pieces allow me to quickly assemble a new body or modify an existing one should it not work in its current configuration. This makes prototyping very easy and I am a lazy person, I like easy. A few months later I bought a second NXT kit, so I can do more experimenting whilst maintaining a more serious project at the same time.

My wonderful wife, Tammy, is very supportive of my ever increasing collection of robots although I do think she wonders if I will ever have enough Lego or robots. Everyone who uses Lego knows, of course, that there is no such thing as too much Lego and you can never have too many robots.