Take this board out of Beta?

[williamlweaver]

Hi Folks,

Recently purchased 10 NXT systems for my senior university course in artificial intelligence. Looking forward to swapping experiences especially after the LabVIEW NXT toolkit is released.

I jumped into this board from the NI link on the NXT page, but I don't see it listed under Special Interest Boards on the main NI Discussion Forums page.

Any chance the visibility of this group can be increased by taking it public?

-Bill =]

[Jason King]

Hi, Bill.  I certainly share your opinion and frustration with the way one must navigate to this board (good thing for bookmarks!).  I believe there is work in progress to make the board more easily accessible.

J

[williamlweaver]

Hi Jason,

I blinked and a year has passed.  We are running the NXT course again this Fall semester and I am trolling the LabVIEW Fans of LEGO board again.

Still no success in taking this board out of Beta?  =]

Last year we used the NXT toolkit and direct commands to make an adaptive cruise control system.

This year the project is an NXT Segway using the Hichtechnic 3-Axis acceleration/Tilt sensor.  I don't remember college being this fun when I was in school...

-Bill  =]

[PTP]

"This year the project is an NXT Segway using the Hichtechnic 3-Axis acceleration/Tilt sensor. I don't remember college being this fun when I was in school..."

Off main topic but is that doable? I thought you needed to use either a gyro och something to measure distance to the surface ie the light sensor??

Also wondered why there was not so much activity in the forum, is it because it is hard to find beeing beta/not listed and all?
/PTP

[williamlweaver]

Hi PTP...

It is our aim to use the HiTechnique Accelerometer as a Level sensor... an alternative to the Gyro.   After looking at the specs for the Gyro, it only returns rotation around a single axis while the Accelerometer returns pitch, roll and yaw.

Looking at the light-sensor solutions on Youtube, it is my guess that the light sensor simply provides a null point around which to set the balance.  Too much lean forward increases light intensity and too much lean backward decreases intensity.

Rather than play with the NXT-G software, we are using LabVIEW and the Fantom.dll driver to talk to the NXT via bluetooth.   We used this solution to "balance" the velocity of the wheels in an adaptive cruise control system using a Fuzzy Logic Controller.   This semester we have designed a two-wheel "segway" and are using the Fuzzy Logic Controller to maintain a null pitch value from the Accelerometer.

We are also using LabVIEW and our LabVIEW-based Fuzzy Logic Controller to create a training set to optimize a Fuzzy Neural Network to achieve the same segway behaviour.  Sort of standard, introductory stuff, but when it is deployed to the NXT bots, it makes it pretty fun...

-Bill  =]

[PTP]

I just ordered both a acceleration/tilt sensor and a gyro to try out so I have not actually tested any of them yet. Just read somewhere that you don´t get any sensible angle just a net acceleration in free fall ie when you flip over. So you don´t really know what to compensate for until its too late? There are a lot of posts considering this at nxtasy.org forums

[gabrielse]

I've been trying to get a LabVIEW vi to read data from the accelerometer.  It sounds like you already wrote the code.  Please share.