Hacking the Lego NXT - Part 2

This is the second part of a series of posts detailing my adventurous venture into the world of hardware hacking/tweaking, whatever you call it. Part 1 has a full introduction.

The Touch Sensor

The touch sensor

So, following my half-successful attempt at getting the stepper motors to work, I decided to focus on something simpler: the touch sensor. At first I thought that this sensor would be a complex series of variable resistors, giving an analog output in terms of how much pressure was being exerted or how far the pin had been pushed in, so I decided against plugging in stuff and seeing what came out for fear of ruining the component.

The teacher who set me this task of tweaking the sensors told me briefly, that the NXT platform was open source and that the schematics could be found online. Having remembered this useful fact, I scoured the Lego Mindstoms NXT website to find these. Buried deep within the “advanced users” section, I found the Hardware Development Kit, along with a whole bunch of other useful stuff, like the Bluetooth API and software development kits, both of which I would have absolutely no idea what to do with!

Looking through the schematics of the complex processor and other sensors, I felt that the touch sensor could not get any better! Then, after opening the schematics file for the touch sensor, I was greeted with this friendly image, lost in the white of the A3-sized document:

The Lego touch sensor schematic

Hacking the Lego NXT - Part 1

Before we start with this slightly tangential series of posts, let me give a word of advice to those who saw the word “hacking” in the title and immediately thought, “HE IS GOING TO HACK INTO SECRET FILES!”. Firstly, any democracy should not have secret files, but that’s for another post, and secondly, “hacking” is what I define as a skillset: the ability to alter the main function of something, be it hardware or software, to suit what you want to do with it. Henry Dyer (@Direthoughts) did a nice piece of hacking, for example, on those Apple Store iPads. It has been the media convincing people that hacking is bad, when in fact, only a small proportion hack with malicious intent. Taking open-source code and altering it is software hacking; building a buggy out of sheet aluminium and plastic is a form of hardware hacking, and what I am going to describe here is a mere alternate manifestation of that.

I am usually not a very adventurous person: I liked my electronic products simple and stupid, never opening them up to reveal the wonders inside. That was until I changed schools, where I was introduced into an environment of tweaking with things and where I encountered a whole new range of people. I urged myself to get involved, and having screwed up my first year by accidentally doing the exact opposite, sought to catch-up in my next year, the one I just finished. Just adding, I believe I have accomplished that!

My altered RJ12 socket

Aside from that, I also set myself the task of clearing out the dusty abyss beneath my bed, having accumulated 4 years worth of junk down there. I found a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit, the robotics kit Lego introduced a few years ago. It was, unfortunately, missing some main pieces, including the processing unit. A new kit cost £200 and the processor itself £99, so there was no way I was going to be able to use that thing again! I still had one out of the three stepper motors and a few sensors. With no clue what to do with these, I offered them to my technology teacher, who kindly denied, as he had no use for them, but recommended I try and hack them for use with an Arduino or PICAXE as a summer project. Maybe then the school could use them.

BYOD and Home IT

Hello there. It's a wonderful summers day at 30,000 feet and I, as stated by many friends, am now obliged to write an airplane post. Although I might be expected to write this by this stage, I assure you, I am still doing this on a solely voluntary basis, plus, I have nothing better to do! For those of you who were bored out of your minds with the previous series of posts, I apologise, but I felt that it might help the next years doing the competition on their torturous journey, and it was nice to reflect on a year gone by, but this post, I have decided, will not have been thought through very well beforehand and will adopt a very decentralised structure.

I shall be talking about BYOD, “bring your own device”, is the "phenomenon", as many IT departments like to call it, where the users of the network (at school/work/etc.) bring in their own devices from home and use them for work. In addition, I shall also be discussing my experiences with being the IT admin at home, and the annoyances that come with it. I plan to link them in some way I have not thought of yet: maybe a stroke of genius will occur or this whole post could fall flat on its face, that's the fun!

I would like to say that my school has an effective BYOD policy in place, and to be honest, I will. I am lucky enough to go to a school that allows the use of personal devices within school hours and even lessons, if the teacher allows it. I am able to, if I wanted, take notes on my iPad and later upload them to my Mac all within the lesson. It's great! Of course, no one abuses that policy to play games in the lesson, well, not me anyway: maybe the "lower third of the year"*. My sister, on the other hand, goes to a school with a, what I perceive to be, a militant ban on these devices, even during break. Both have their benefits and shortcomings.

A Challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 4

That's me on the right with a terrible hairstyle.

It has been a while since the last post, and let me tell you, it has been an eventful while, not least the fact that I had my exams during that period, for which I started revising far too late, but enough with the formalities and lets conclude the epic tale of the Toyota Technology Challenge.

So, after our 8 hour “make it work” session, as described in part 3, we were on the way once again the next morning in our supervising teacher’s cramped mini-cooper to Derbyshire; a 2 hour drive from London. The systems engineer, the chief designer and myself, the team manager, were apprehensive of our chances, but at the same time, thinking through the various situations that could occur at the nationals.

On the way, we stopped at a service station, where my teacher and I devoured a hamburger, to the disgust of my team. Just thought I should include that for some reason.

We arrived and set up shop. Looking around, every other team there seemed to have prepared themselves very well! They had key chains, posters, display boards and even branded gifts for the other teams. Our table had our buggy, a sheet of plastic, repair kits, soldering irons and at least 3 laptops. We dubbed it the engineer’s table, but when I noticed a judge looking at the tables and making thorough notes, I quickly became nervous.

A Challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 3

As I said in my previous post of this series, we had miraculously made it through to the National Finals, despite our car being made out of an unsustainable material and not even navigating the course properly at the Regionals! We were truly surprised at the result, but still aware of the challenges that faced us.

On the ride back to the school inside my teacher’s cramped black Mini Cooper, we discussed various things that we would have to do within the 27 days before the Nationals: we would have to rewrite our presentation according to the judges advice, rebuild the entire buggy out of a more sustainable material and design an entirely new algorithm to even stand a chance of winning the Nationals. We were representing the South East of England, and we wanted to at least achieve a respectable ranking!

Following a day of chit-chat, discussing the various things that had to be done, we consulted a few technology teachers as to what material would be best to use and could be assembled into a buggy quickly enough. All signs were pointing towards aluminium, being an infinitely recyclable material, but I was sceptical about the timescale it would take to build this, especially considering that it took us two and a half weeks to assemble a laser-cut case. The aluminium would need to be drilled, cut and sanded to precise specifications and then assembled with nuts and bolts.

A challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote a post chronicling the journey to the regional finals of the Toyota Technology Challenge (TTC). Following a relatively simple German internal exam and a slightly controversial post for Collatyral Damage over the course of this past week, I am now able to continue my telling of this perilous journey through the TTC.

If I am totally honest, the journey was indeed perilous, as I shall explain shortly.

So, we had a functioning buggy and a fairly decent algorithm ready to go. We thought we stood a fairly good chance at winning the regional finals on the Monday following the Friday after school testing session I mentioned earlier. We enjoyed a fairly relaxed weekend and on Monday, gathered all our stuff, including some potent superglue, a tool kit, a wire spool, two laptops, two types of tape, a spare microcontroller and everything else we thought we would need if the worse came to worse.

At 10:35am we were off on the way to the Duxford Imperial War Museum, squashed within my teacher’s Mini Cooper on a (perilous) 2 hour drive out of London. See the peril in that?

Anyway, we arrived and clambered out of the compact car, in uniform and the rest, marching into the museum with our modest red project tray, greeted by the museum manager and a representative from Toyota. We were shown our respective table, underneath the wing of the BA Concord, and instructed to set up. Perplexed by this instruction, we observed other teams walking in with an arsenal of posters, demonstration vehicles and pin-up boards, and asked ourselves whether we should have done the same. After some discussion, we concluded that I was a much better idea to get the buggy working first than waste time on articles the judges did not even look at.

A Challenge, a Concorde and a Mystical Magnetic Field - Part 1

How do these three seemingly unrelated items morph together to form a coherent story, I ask you? It seems almost impossible to think that some sort of challenge or competition can be related to a Concorde or to a mystical magnetic field, am I correct? Well, I ask you to continue reading to find out the tale of the links between these on a project that has been on-going since January and has taken up most of my life.

Ok, maybe it’s not that dramatic, but the essence of it is true. As mentioned in my last post, I had entered a competition called the Toyota Technology Challenge, in which my small team of three had to plan, prototype and manufacture a buggy capable of navigating an obstacle course, while maintaining a high level of efficiency and environmentally friendliness.

There we have it. A challenge. For an inexperienced bunch like us, it was an interesting proposition and one we gladly took up without second thought. The first out of many hurdles arrived as such: The challenge website initially suggested that teams start in early September researching and developing ideas. Then, over the following months, assemble a buggy, document everything in a coherent piece of paperwork and submit it to see if you gained a place in the regional finals. The deadline for this is the end of February. The fun part came when the organising teacher only told us about the challenge and the deadline mid-January. We in effect had six weeks to research, build, test and document the entire process within a 20,000 word, 30-page document.

Education and the Examination Swindle - Part 3

Editors note: Alicia Cuddeford is the author of 'Hello the Internet!' at http://ohlookaliciasblog.wordpress.com/. I am glad to have her here to provide a bit of diversity to the arguments, laid out in my recent posts on Education, parts 1 and 2.

Hello fellow CompBlog readers! I was recently asked by Nicolas to write a guest post for his wonderful site, an offer which I could not refuse. It would be nice to write for people other than friends who have taken pity on me for attempting to become a successful blogger. This is also a brilliant forum for writing something worthwhile and showing it to a different audience.

For those unaware of how I write, my blogging style is basically “Think of a subject and then tap hands on keyboard making words that sort of associate with the topic and end up with an incredibly strange piece of text”. However, I have structured and planned this blog, so hopefully it will be coherent.

I think that’s all you need to know — on with the task in hand.

I would like to consider myself a teenager, and like most teenagers, I am in full time education, and probably will be until I leave university at the age of 21.

And like most teenagers, I’m not a fan of our education system. I think it has failed certain groups and individuals.

With permission, I am taking the example of somebody of I know. He just about scraped through his GCSEs, achieving Cs (and the occasional A, to his credit). His expected grades were As/A*s, but his work ethic was non-existent — so what did the teachers do? Well, he was capable of getting a C without doing any revision or extra work, so they left him to his own devices. I would guess that this is because when you go to any secondary school, they show their GCSE results as “87% of our pupils achieved A*-C grade in more than five subjects," for example. Schools (generally — in my experience) don’t care as long as you “pass” — achieve a C, so they can climb higher in the league table of A*-C grades and give the impression of a good reputation.