Designing Lego Mindstorms NXT sensors

I bought a Lego Mindstorms kit last month to mess with, I’ve got some ideas for robot localisation that I want to try out. Anyway, the kit comes with a sonar range finder but I wanted a little more accuracy and smaller detection area. I’ve got a bunch of Sharp rangefinders from another project and they would work perfectly for what I wanted. A couple of companies sell after market sensors for the NXT, Mindsensors and HiTechnic but it’s much more fun to design and build your own.

For a little background on how the Sharp sensors work, Acroname Robotics has a good article on them.

Adapter board for the ATtiny45

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Posted in Embedded Firmware, Hardware Design, Software at August 6th, 2010. 5 Comments.

Laser cut Bus Pirate and AVR Dragon cases

A couple of days ago I saw this story on Hack a Day (On the Go Prototyping)

[Riley Porter] has been working on several different custom enclosure designs … as well as slick-looking cases for the Bus Pirate, tinyISP, and face plates for word clocks.

Well the cases were pretty slick-looking. I liked his ideas of using layers of laser cut perspex, so I designed my own Bus Pirate V2go and Atmel AVR Dragon cases.

Thanks to my friend Warren for cutting them for me.

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Posted in Development Tools at April 13th, 2010. 5 Comments.