NXTuino v0.1 working

It is a long time since my last experiment on communication between Arduino and LEGO NXT. But now I finally had some time to put on this project, and I'm proud to announce that v0.1 of the NXTuino is alive and kicking! For the time being, Arduino is able to drive a virtual ON-OFF touch sensor connected to the LEGO Brick.
The proof of concept that I implemented is to blink the Lego green light in sync with a LED connected to Arduino. Again the connection wire is the one illustrated in the book "Extreme NXT". For this simple sensor I'm only using two wires (black and white).
My final goal is to enable to control LEGO NXT functionalities from Arduino, in order to support remote control through a web interface.
I'll keep you posted on my next advances...

Walking Biped Robots

It is amazing how it is possible to use LEGO Mindstorms to study robotics - and enjoying it all the time!
It took me a couple of days during free time to build a robot based on the Resonant Biped by Danny Benedettelli. Practically speaking, it is a great design of a walking robot on two legs which moves based on a simple yet effective weight shifting approach. I needed to change a couple of parts to make it work with my components. If you are interested, details are on my homepage.
Meanwhile, you can check the following shot:

Technical Writing

Nowadays, if you are working in scientific research, you must develop some skills in technical writing, to be able to disseminate your work and foster collaboration with other people. Unfortunately, this is something that usually the universities do not teach you during their degree studies! Usually, writing skills are incrementally developed based on collaboration with colleagues, natural attitude, expertise, feedback by reviewers, etc. However, there are good sources of information to allow faster development of those necessary skills to present in written form and defend our scientific developments. The following are some links to websites where it is possible to find some useful information:

6 Top Reference Sites to Write a Winning Research Paper
How to Write a Research Paper
How to Write a Paper

Enjoy!

Nerdkits begins

Tonight I remembered I bought a Nerdkit, containing an Atmel ATMEGA and several nice stuff (including USB programming cable, AVR compiler, and a lot of resources). Therefore, since I'm also quite tired, I decided to take it easy and start with the first tutorials. In around one hour, I built the breadboard Nerdkit platform, tested it, installed drivers and development software, developed a sample temperature A/D conversion with LCD output and ran it.

Everything went smooth, very nice electronic documentation, easy to follow tutorial content. Clearly, it sounds the same as Arduino - but once you already worked with Arduino it is nice to try something "more hardware" where you build actually everything from single components. Inspiring!

P.S.: To tell you the truth, I got inspired by an article I just read on Make magazine about some guys teaching hardware and software Arduino development starting from bare components, no soldering - just breadboard. Amazing!!!

Like videogames? Try kogregate.com!

It defines itself as the "YouTube of games", and Kogregate is really something like that: everyone can upload new games (mainly in Adobe Flash) and gain access to thousands of impressive games. Developers range from single hobbists to actual professional game developers, quality is really amazing. Give it a try, and you'll never have problems in finding a good game to play anymore!

Back to my hobbies

Hi! Finally I came back from a looong time of extremely busy schedule. I'm still working at the finalization of my previous ideas and will be back soon with updated.
For the time being, I suggest you to visit Hack a Day website: it is worthy to grab some good ideas and inspiration for further projects!