Xander's BotBench

A place to collect snippets and thoughts. For full articles, tutorials and other news, check out botbench.com

[botbench]

Coding with Codie is live!

I wrote about the cute wooden robot named Codie a little while back.  Peter Erdei, one of the team members, told me yesterday that their IndieGoGo campaign is now live.  They're at 22% of $70,000 a...

[botbench]

Awesome YouTube FLL Tutorials

If you're an (aspiring) FLL participant or just someone who wants to learn some cool new programming tricks with their EV3, you may be interested in Kyle Markland, a.k.a. Builderdude35's YouTube ch...

[botbench]

Robot Virtual Worlds on iPad

If you like programming but don't have a robot, or you just can't get enough of programming robots, then go check out the latest version of the Robot Virtual Worlds iPad app.  It was updated yester...

[botbench]

I'm going to The Big Bang

I am going to The Big Bang event in about 2 weeks from now.  What is this event, you ask?  It's a fair for students to learn more about science and technology.  There will be demonstrations, worksh...

[botbench]

Released: ROBOTC 4.30 / 3.65

This update is mostly a "bug fix" release to take care of a few issues + inclusion of the recently released VEX Cortex Master Firmware Update (4.25).  If you're still using 4.27, you can see the ch...

[botbench]

Released: ROBOTC 4.29

So you think you can Changelog?  Grab a cup of coffee and something to eat, because this is a LONG list.  ROBOTC 4.29 is out we've made a lot of changes to all platforms.  Many bugs were squashed a...

[botbench]

Coding with Codie

  Codie is an artisanal robot, hand-crafted from wood.  However, don't let the old school materials fool you; inside the wooden exterior hides a sophisticated robot.  It sports quite a number ...

[botbench]

Virtual Brick: License Give-Away

Want to earn a free Virtual Brick license?  Be one of the first 20 to write a review about it on your website, blog or Tumblr or whatever it is you crazy kids use nowadays, and you'll receive a fre...

[botbench]

Cool Kickstarter: OpenElectrons EVShield

OpenElectrons, which is run by the guys who own Mindsensors, are about to start another Kickstarter campaign for their latest creation: the EVShield for Arduino Uno, Duemilanove and Leonardo.  What...

[botbench]

Virtual Brick: A First Look - Making a Line Follower

Robomatter has released a new product called the Virtual Brick.  It's not completely new, of course, it used to be called Virtual NXT, but since it's a become a bit more generic, it has been rename...

[botbench]

Stay up-to-date on Driver Suite Developments

I've been working hard to make changes to the Driver Suite, to make it more EV3 compatible and to change the API to a more struct oriented approach.  You can now stay up-to-date on the latest chang...

[botbench]

VEX IQ Quadruped: Building Instructions!

Some of you may remember I posted about my VEX IQ Quadruped a while back.  I now have building instructions for it! They were made by Christopher Richard Smith, who is quite the CAD ninja.  This is...

[botbench]

Using Robot Virtual Worlds inside a VM

If you're like me and you use a lot of Virtual Machines, then this may be of some use to you.  In Robot Virtual Worlds, you have 3 camera settings: Follow mode: you can use the wheel to zoom in and...

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Released: ROBOTC 4.28

Just in time for Christmas! A new release of ROBOTC for both LEGO MINDSTORMS and VEX.  So many new features and bug fixes have been added for all the platforms that the original ROBOTC blog had to ...

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Coming Soon: Mindsensors Grove Sensor Adapter for EV3 or NXT

I was wondering if a one of the 3rd party sensor companies was ever going to come up with an EV3/NXT adapter for the Grove System.  Not sure what it is?  Grove System is an interface standard that ...

[botbench]

The FATCATLAB's Meow: EVB

Imagine an EV3 with a backlit screen, a 1GHz CPU, instead a 300MHz one and 8 times more memory, that's pretty much what the EVB is.  It's a cape (kind of like an Arduino Shield) for the BeagleBone ...

[botbench]

Mindsensors Programming Poll

Mindsensors are doing a poll to find out which is your favourite programming environment for the EV3!  You can guess which one I picked. That's right, ROBOTC, of course. You can find the poll on th...