My Senior Design Project at Rose-Hulman is integrating a kinematic robotic arm on the National Instruments Robotics Starter Kit (DaNI). DaNI is small mobile robotics platform based on NI SingleBoardRIO and Tetrix. We are working with the arm and DaNI as two separate systems right now and plan to integrate it in December. We spent the last few weeks working on constructing and controlling the arm. All software done in LabVIEW! Check out the video below to see our progress!
Archive for November, 2011
NI DaNI Arm
Posted: November 13, 2011 in Engineering, National Instruments, News, RoboticsTags: DaNI, LabVIEW, National Instruments, RHIT, RIO, Robots, Rose-Hulman, Tetrix
Yesterday the musical group ArcAttack visited Rose-Hulman and gave us a behind the scenes look at how they generate music with Tesla Coils. One of the best parts of their shows is having the audience go inside the Farady Cage. During the workshop, some Rose-Hulman professors decided to put their lives in the hands Faraday’s Law. Check out the video below to see if they got a charge out of the experience or if science really is useful.
Dexter Industries’ WIFI Week
Posted: November 9, 2011 in Engineering, LEGO, News, RoboticsTags: BotBench, Dexter Industries, DI, LEGO MINDSTORMS, NXT-G, RobotC, RS485, wifi
In celebration of the release of their new WiFi sensor, Dexter Industries has been blogging and posting example code of how to use it. While the code is written for RobotC, the same commands can be sent with the original RS485 block (or VIs) posted on the Files page. In support of this new sensor, I will be re-posting some of the examples using these blocks! You can head over to Dexter Industries’ blog and read more on this cool new sensor! Then check out some of the projects Xander did over at BotBench! The sensor is now on sale via the Dexter Industries website. I highly recommend this sensor as it fairly easy to use and really expands the MINDSTORMS platform!
RS485 NXT-G Block Beta
Posted: November 4, 2011 in LEGO, NewsTags: beta, LEGO MINDSTORMS, NXT-G, NXTBee, RS485
For those of you who have been waiting for an update for the NXT-G RS485 block, today is your day! I have posted a new download for a beta of the upcoming block (currently version 2.28) on the Files page of my blog. The big advantage is the implementation of a timeout for sending and receiving data. Basically the block will try to receive data 10 times (total of 10 ms) before moving on. It will also have a max timeout of 100 ms. I suspect the block will change a bit over the next 24 hours as comments come in, so watch for updates and a new version change. (I have several known bugs already.) I wanted to get this out there so people can play with it and let me know! Give it a try and leave your comments below.