Mindboards

I agree very much, that light bulbs, or other resistors would probably be more precise that motors. Using the motors does have a bunch of disadvantages (from precision load, regardless of the wear on the motor, the test will be noisy, and the test will cause some wear on the motors. Regardless, I th...

As soon as I have a few hours, I'll make some initial measurements. I think I can borrow 9 or even 12 motors, set the brick to run on a stabilized power supply, and then measure the motor power consumption under different conditions. The goal should be to find a way to generate a well-defined amp. l...

Sorry - been away for some weeks now! :) Great to hear that I caught your interest! Regarding the fan method for putting load on the motors, the wind resistance will depend on the air density, which again depends on the local air pressure, temperature and humidity, and then it becomes rather complex...

Have another look. Windows downloads are to two lines near the bottom:

Windows x86 76.66 MB jdk-6u25-windows-i586.exe
Windows x64 67.27 MB jdk-6u25-windows-x64.exe

- depending on wether you want a 32-bit version or you want a 64-bit version. Simply download and run the EXE-file to install.

I've tried a bit of sensor detection myself. At least to ensure that the sensors I've plugged into the robot, just might be correctly connected. As mentioned before, the I2C sensors are pretty straight forward. It's the analog sensors that may cause problems. The analog sensors may however behave qu...

Sorry - I didn't see the poll.. LeJOS for me, thanks! In very short: Full support for classes with local method names, inheritance, overloading. World class development environment using eg. Eclipse or Netbeans Full support for recursion, threads, dynamic allocation, automatic garbage collection. Go...

Hi there Using a task (or thread, as it may be called in other programming languages) for the ball and for the controller is kinda neat. Both the ball and the controls have their own "life". But modelling the bricks as tasks is not such a great idea, as you point out yourself. It doesn't w...

Yes, the odd thing is that the alkaline batteries are rated at 1.5V, but very quickly drops to 1.1-1.3V, whereas rechargeable NiMH batteries actually start at 1.4V but stays well over the alkaline batteries for quite some time - especially at a high current. This means that you NXT motors might star...

Yes Imahara is a pretty cool robot builder. I love the Mythbuster show!! But no, that was not what I meant by a battery tester. Let me try again: I want to test the batteries inside the NXT brick itself. Build a robot, load the NXT brick with the batteries to be tested, and run the program. The prog...

Hi doc I wrote one in Lejos some time ago, and it works pretty well under the given circumstances (small processor, very limited amount of space, coarse sampling frequency etc.). There are lots of FFT algorihms out there, but you'll probably need to do some translation. Google for FFT numerical reci...