Just in time for summer, the ROBOTC dev-team has released the first Public BETA of “ROBOTC for Arduino”. The Arduino is a cool, low-cost embedded controller board that is great for learning the basics of robotics, electronics and creative engineering.

The new version of ROBOTC has support for all of the popular official Arduino boards – Diecimila, Duemilanove, Uno, MEGA 1280 and MEGA 2560.

Over the past few months, the ROBOTC Development team has been updating all of the ROBOTC documentation and moving it to our new ROBOTC Wiki website. This new Wiki will contain a full in-depth function reference for all ROBOTC platforms. The eventual goal is to have the Wiki be the central location for all ROBOTC documentation.

The Robot Virtual World team is proud to announce a brand new virtual environment: The Ruins of Atlantis!

European, Asian, and African histories all reference an ancient city named Atlantis. According to legend, Atlantis was the center of trade and commerce for Eurasia thousands of years ago. Atlantis had incredible wealth due to a combination of prolific natural resources, people that were gifted and wise, and because it was located on …

We came across an article about a great initiative that’s happening in Africa. A program called AFRON, or the African Robotics Network, is “aiming to mobilize a community of institutions and individuals working on robotics-related areas, strengthening communication and collaboration among them.”

You can read more about AFRON by clicking on the following link:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/african-robotics-network

NeXT-Generation, over on the ROBOTC forums, posted a very cool project he’s been working on for the last two months.  It’s an automated brick sorter made with a combination of Mindstorms NXT, Power Functions and Pneumatics.

YouTube Direct Link 

The video might be long but it’s well worth watching!

Naturally, we asked him questions about his creation:

What motivated you to make this?
I wanted to build a robot that was interactive and would entertain smaller kids, and be mechanically interesting to older ones, and …