Moving to BNXT

Hello all,

I am moving my more technical NXT articles to BNXT as it has more readership and FIlip has been very supportive. I will retain this site perhaps for more personal NXT concepts - things that I dont think belong on BNXT (like my everyday creations or perhaps my soon to be FLL team)

I think I will be more involved on NXTasy now that I have bothered to get an account.

Check back occasionally please,
Or if you like what I do I could post my unprocessed thougths here and then put the cleaned up summaries at BNXT.

Thanks for visiting

Drew

Firming up the Memory issue

I dont know if anyone else has noticed this but my NXT is often telling that with 20kb of space that it can not accept a Bright Turn Right Dark Turn Left line following program which when finally installed was no where near that big. Defragmentation might be a big problem. It requires either that you take off all your programs, and some time (as per the Help file) re-firmware (defrag) your NXT. Further still this firmware update as according to NXT Hacks @ http://nxt.natulte.net/trac/wiki/ElectricStorm is detrimental in the long term because,
"the lock bits, which let firmwares write-protect themselves, are only guaranteed for about a hundred toggles."
That means that if you are often "reformating" your NXT one day it may break.
:(

I'd like to open comments for people to share if they have had alot of memory allocation problems.
I found that mine seem to happen most when you have big files as the first ones you've uploaded. So I might suggest that you load any mini programs first and save the beefy ones for later. However this means that you cant just load your biggest (best?) and see what else fits.
The Option in the memory manager to erase all user files might be the best bet, but if you have alot of mainstay programs you want always loaded it might be annoying.

Please comment on anything to do with memory here.

Start your Brains

Welcome to NXTidea... a blog dedicated to Lego Robotics.
Mindstorms NXT RIS Scout Spybot trains and more

This is my first blog and I can not garuntee that it will remain a blog. My goal is to eventually create a clearing house for NXT ideas. Not a repository for complete inventions, but suggestions for componenets that can be mixed and matched in YOUR NXT idea.

I have been an observer of the old RIS lego community but felt like I was chasing coat tails. Now that I am aboard at the begining I hope to help shape how ideas are shared. My passion is to teach. I will be working on material for Teachers and welcome suggestions. Alas that is also why I am so fixated on ideas. Durring my RIS years I was heavily into year round university (many years) and as such usually could do nothing more than look at my RIS kits and imagine what they could do. Without time to build I found I was equally facinated by what was possible. Hours of daydreaming on the bus have resulted in many ideas and a passion to share both ways with Lego enthusiasts.

You can find comments from me on www.bnxt.com and on thenxtstep.com. Filip of bnxt has asked me to co-contribute. I am not sure how that would work so I signed up for a blog account. If there are no more posts here, then check there.

I am hopeing to use the NXTwiki that Filip posted about to realize my dream of modular ideas on the web and this site to show case the best and hold discussions. I hope to also write articles if anything about Lego Robotics needs mentioning. I am very interested in Legacy work so anyone interested in discussing how cross platform communication is possible (ie Spybots, RIS etc working with each other) please let me know.

Thanks for visiting, come again

Drew Stevenson
Teacher