Dexter Industries is coming out with another new sensor for the Lego NXT Mindstorms system.  This one will mimic the bending motions of your finger, or measure the bend of different joints.  Check out the video!  We wrote a quick program, tied the sensor to our fingers, and had an NXT Mindstorms Motor turning with the flick of our...

In this post, we just want to cover how to use the dSwitch with two languages: RobotC and Lejos.  To use the dSwitch in NXT-G, see our website for the block.

Thanks to a few readers and a post in The NXT Step Blog Post, we’ve seen some serious interest in our upcoming dSolar release.   We’re planning on releasing the dSolar with some new peripherals next month.  If you’d like us to notify you when we’re about to release, take a quick survey on our website.  It’s quick and easy,...

This week, we wanted to give everyone a small hint about what’s coming soon from Dexter Industries.  We’ve been working for the past month on a solar power system for the Mindstorms NXT system.  That’s right, soon you’ll be able to power Lego Mindstorms robots with nothing but the sun. Some pictures and a video of what we’ve been...

Burning on the back of our minds one morning was just how our thermometers would perform with different lengths of sensor chord.  The new Lego thermometer is limited, we’re told, by its IIC chords.  But because our thermometer line is analog, the sensor should be able to reach much further.  To test this, we took three open thermometers with...

We set out to put the new Dexter Industries Thermometers  through trials.  How accurate is it?  How quickly does it respond to temperature changes?  What kind of resolution do we get with it?  Just how good is the thermometer? First, Brian Davis wrote a great blog entry about the Lego thermometers and a really nice analysis of their performance. ...

While working on some temperature programs, we found we needed to use the natural logarithm function. The natural logarithm function provided by Labview is not supported in NXT.  So we went ahead and developed this algorithm.  It works if the operator is greater than 0 (x > 0). The algorithm approaches natural logarithm by performing an iterative calculation.  The...

Humans have been brewing beer for thousands of years.  Crucial to quality brewing is temperature control.  Two typical steps in the process are steeping grains and the boil.  Both steps require strict temperature control; getting it wrong can make a mess, and even more tragic, destroy the beer  Learn more about how to avoid tragedy . . .

Earlier we posted on how we used some free time over the holidays to make Adafruit’s Tweet-A-Watt project. We wanted to see if we could combine the device with the dSwitch and conserve some energy around the office. We wrote a quick program that “listens” for a human, and turns the lights off if no one is there. The...

Dave Astolfo’s Plastibots blog recently put together a really clever aquarium monitor and temperature controller using some clever programming and the dSwitch. Check it out here: http://www.plastibots.com/?p=1429 If you have a clever use for the dSwitch, write us or send us a message through Facebook! Check out the dSwitch here.