ROBOTC.net Blog  

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 …

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 …

Full credit for the work behind this post goes to ROBOTC user Matthieu V. Thanks Matthieu!

The VEX LCD is a fantastic tool, allowing you to display messages and values on the robot with very little effort. Some programmers even use a combination of the screen and input buttons to create a basic user interface on their robots – allowing them to …

We’ll be continually updating this blog post to put up any awesome videos we grab from the 2012 FIRST World Championship in St. Louis.
TETRIX Shooter bot

 
Humanoid TETRIX robot

 
NXT Gyro Balancer with Bluetooth remote NXT
Check out this video! It’s an NXT that is using a Gyro Balancer in order to keep itself up. But that’s not all! It’s also using a Bluetooth Remote NXT to control it.

Check out our Facebook Gallery as we update it!
Our 2012 FIRST World Championship …

Here’s a neat video we found of a user who made a Pong or Brick Breaker type game in ROBOTC.

Got a new VEX Speaker? VEX Robotics just announced (and released) their new Speaker accessory for the VEX Cortex Microcontroller. This cool new speaker will allow you to play tones, sounds and wave (.wav) sound files from your VEX Cortex.

There have been reports of the VEX Cortex locking up when using the new Integrated Motor Encoders. The root cause appears to be an unhandled exception that is generated when the I2C communication link between the Cortex and encoders is compromised. To prevent the Cortex from locking up, we’ve put together a new ROBOTC Firmware file that handles the exception. The differences between this new firmware and the version included in ROBOTC …