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Lego NXT Linear Actuators!

Friday, March 5th, 2010

How cool! With these new Lego NXT compatible Linear Actuators you can easily add strong linear motion to your next Lego Mindstorms project. We now offer both 50mm and 100mm varieties.

Time to expand your building power with your Lego Mindstorms®. You must be tired of rotating things all day with regular old motors. It’s time to start moving things bach and forth, up and down, in and out! Like a REAL engineer. Firgelli actuators will make you the coolest kid on the block for certain.

Lego Mindstorm®, Power Functions®, and Technic® compatible Linear Actuators. These linear actuators are self contained units which include an electric motor. They will push up to 25N and move at 12mm/s unloaded.

For use with your NXT® Brick you will need a standard NXT® connection cable to connect it in place of one of the Mindstorm® Servos, and you will need to download the Firgelli L12-NXT Block here.

For manual use with Lego Power Functions® you will require the Cable-NXT-PF available on this site. For manual use with older Lego Technic® style battery packs you will require the Cable-NXT-Technic available on this site.

Please note: The Lego Group does not endorse these products. Lego®, NXT®, Mindstorms®, Technic® and Power Functions® are trademarks of The Lego Group.

Tags: actuators, Firgelli, Lego, Linear, Minstorms, NXT
Posted in Front Page News, Lego Mindstorms, New Kits / Products | No Comments »

Announcing Trossen Robotics’ Spring Cleaning Garage Sale!

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

It’s that time of year again! We’ve gone through the piles of various robot parts accumulated over the last year as well as products we’re moving out of our catalog to make room for new stuff, and discounted it heavily! Builders, Tinkerers, and Deal-Hunters rejoice, we’ve cut prices to move this stuff out the door quickly. Quantities are limited and if this sale is anything like last year, it will go quick, so don’t wait long. Everything from servos to beginner robot kits to wheels to chargers to batteries and much, much more! Stop by and check out all the savings for yourself in our Garage Sale section!

- The Trossen Robotics Team

Posted in Announcements, Front Page News | No Comments »

Giger v2.0 – Initial Walking Gait Progress

Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010

New upgrades! Giger now uses 10x EX-106+, 6x RX-64s, and 8x RX-28s for a total of 24 DOF.

Giger’s upgrades got finalized late Sunday night and I had a bit of time to sit down and start to work on the walking gaits (from scratch). The EX-106+ is roughly 4x more precise than all previous Dynamixels, so the positional values do not translate over well when upgrading from a previous model. What does that mean? It was far simpler to just start over rather than try to scale the values step by step. All new custom brackets used in the legs and feet, as well as new elbow/shoulder brackets and arm extensions. Brackets were designed in Autodesk Inventor 2008 and machined by Rapid Sheet Metal. It’s worth mentioning that all of the custom, as well as the stock, brackets and frames that are used in Giger’s arms and legs are available in our store on our Dynamixel Servo & Bracket page! Even his ankles/hip joints or his entire legs!

A lot of projects tend to only show updates after many dozens and/or hundreds of hours of progress, but I like to show the little steps as I feel it gives one a better view of the evolution of a project and what goes into making a robot work. Keep in mind; I have this gait tuned to a very slow rate so that I can work on the balance and COG shifting correctly, it can then be sped up to a more realistic, useful speed. Here’s a short video of my initial walking gait progress (about 2 hours of programming work so far) on Giger 2.0:

Tags: Dynamixel, EX-106, Giger, humanoid, robot, Robotis, RX-28, RX-64
Posted in Bioloid, Dynamixel, Featured Robots, Front Page News, Humanoid Robots, Mech Warfare, Robotis | No Comments »

Arbotix Commander Now Available: Xbee Wireless Robot Gamepad

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

Introducing the newest addition to the ArbotiX Robocontroller line from Vanadium Labs!

The ArbotiX Commander is an Arduino Software compatible, open-source XBEE-wireless hand-held controller built specifically for controlling ArbotiX/NUKE powered walking robots (but it can be used to control just about any Arduino powered robot). This gamepad style controller comes ready to be setup with the ArbotiX Robocontroller. The ArbotiX Commander was meant to be hacked, modified, upgraded, and otherwise tinkered with. Add additional sensors, customize it with your own handle grips, or rewrite the firmware sketch in any way you see fit!

Tags: arbotix, arduino, ax-12+, Bioloid, commander
Posted in Bioloid, Featured Projects, Front Page News, New Kits / Products, Product Spotlight, Robotis, arbotix | No Comments »

Brackets and Dynamixels and Bioloids Oh My!

Friday, February 12th, 2010

We’ve been a bit quiet around here lately, mostly because we have our heads buried and are hard at work at bringing you guys some awesome new robotics products and kits! Wanted to take some time to showcase a new reworked section of our site that helps builders like you build your robots easier. Our Robot Servos & Brackets section has been completely revamped, pairing up the servos with compatible brackets and frames (tons of new varieties have been added, as well as more to come).

The Robotis Dynamixel Servos section should be of particular intrest, as we now stock individual Bioloid Frames as well as every type of DX/RX/EX Series Brackets and Frames.

Even our Hobby Servos section got a revamp, now offering Micro, Standard, and Giant Scale PWM Hobby Servos and compatible brackets!

We also started rounding up some cool user projects to demonstrate what can be done with these awesome actuators, which can be found on various related product pages. Here are a few examples!