Extremely cool course at University of Cambridge

[linusa]

At University of Cambridge there's an extremly cool project going on! As their very first encouter at university, freshman engineers get to build and experiment with NXT kits. There are some really great robots. I especially like how the sample robots relate to experiments in physics. And it's always nice to see new ways of data analysis.

So, go and check it out: http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~ahg/pre_lego/

There are links to MPEG videos inside. What's your favourite project?

[rbnnxt]

This is very interesting. I found that the supplied url could not access all the pages i.e. the projects at the bottom timed out. A better link appears to be http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/IALego/

[mightor]

This one is the winner in my books: http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/IALego/steam.html , the steam engine.

- Xander

[rghansen]

Why do people waste so much time fighting about odometry when there are so many ultra-cool robots out there just waiting to be built?

[schodet]

At University of Cambridge there's an extremly cool project going on!

They seems to use your Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB with Octave, is it right?

[linusa]

They seems to use your Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB with Octave, is it right?

At least that's their plan, I believe. I know they're using MATLAB on most of their student PCs for this project, but there's definitely the goal to be independent from MATLAB (which, due to high licensing costs, many people working with MATLAB would like to see).

On the other hand, to my last information, Octave does not work with the NXT toolbox (yet), at least not with all features. This is in agreement with what I hear from most MATLAB users (not NXT related), that Octave (or Scilab) are no real match for MATLAB (yet) -- lack of features, support, documentation, quality. I don't know for sure.

Apparently the University of Cambridge are working on improving Octave (and contributing back to the open source project) to support the RWTH NXT toolbox. We (as original developers of that toolbox) would of course appreciate that very much. Finally we could offer a totally free & open source all-in-one-package with all those features needed to control NXTs and work with them. I have no up-to-date information about how it's going though.

[linusa]

This one is the winner in my books: http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/IALego/steam.html , the steam engine.

Yeah, finally a speed regulation control mechanism we can all enjoy and that has proven to work for "ages", really

I personally like the resplendent Roman balance, it simply amazes me that it works (and then of course how), and it's a good exercise / application on the PC side.

[rbnnxt]

At University of Cambridge there's an extremly cool project going on!

They seems to use your Mindstorms NXT Toolbox for MATLAB with Octave, is it right?

Well, inspired by this cool course, I've installed octave on my Mac and played with it, working through an excellent tutorial by Dr P.J.G. Long of Cambridge University I've also tried adding the Mindstorms NXT Toolbox, but unfortunately octave does not have all the necessary support. For example, when initialising the connection to the NXT brick it used the MATLAB loadlibrary command to set up the fantom driver. Currently octave does not appear to support this.

I too look forward to the day when someone manages to get the NXT Toolbox or a derivative working with octave. It would then make it affordable for individuals to use, because the present MATLAB licensing fees are too exorbitant to justify hobbyist use.

[linusa]

Well, inspired by this cool course, I've installed octave on my Mac and played with it, working through an excellent tutorial by Dr P.J.G. Long of Cambridge University

Have you got a link to that tutorial?

I too look forward to the day when someone manages to get the NXT Toolbox or a derivative working with octave. It would then make it affordable for individuals to use, because the present MATLAB licensing fees are too exorbitant to justify hobbyist use.

I couldn't agree more...

[rbnnxt]

Have you got a link to that tutorial?

There is a link to the tutorial here http://xoctave.webs.com/