Features:

• Tracks relative position
• Measures rotational angle and speed
• Detects contact from any direction
• Measures tilt and acceleration
• Ultra low bias drift of about 10 degrees per hour

All the details, and the chance to buy, can be found on the CruizCore XG1300L website.

Here is a sample Demo video":

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

This SDK includes the following features:

• Raw sensor streams

  Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.

• Skeletal tracking

  The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.

• Advanced audio capabilities

  Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

• Sample code and documentation

  The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

• Easy installation

  The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

Download:  Kinect SDK for Windows

Xander has one of the best collection of links for the Kinect SDK I’ve seen.    Kinect SDK is Finally Here!

WARNING: This firmware is pre-release firmware. It may temporarily cause your Netduino to cease functioning properly. If this firmware does not work for you, you will likely need to erase your Netduino completely and re-flash the production v4.1.0.6 bootloader using Atmel SAM-BA tools (on a 32-bit Windows installation) and the production v4.1.0.6 firmware using MFDeploy.

NOTE: This beta firmware must be used with a beta version of the Microsoft .NET Micro Framework SDK.

If you’re an early adopter and would like to help us test and refine these new features, this beta release may be for you.

This firmware includes the following updates:

1. Visual Basic support (including Visual Basic Express 2010)
2. StringBuilder support
3. Extension method support
4. Dozens of bugfixes

More details, download link and discussion can be found here:   Version: 4.2.0 BETA 1 (version 4.2.0.0 b1)

• I changed the min, max and clip functions to macros and renamed them to min2, min3, max2, max3 and clip.  min2 and min3 are for two and three numbers respectively and will work with any type.
• I’ve added support for the MicroInfiniy CruizCore XG1300L with two example programs.  One is a text only example but I got a bit fancy with the second version and made some graphical representation of the data from the sensor.  Try it, you’ll like it, I’m sure.  The new driver is called MICC-driver.h, the examples are MICC-test1.c and MICC-test2.c
• Fixed MSDISTsendCmd() in the Mindsensors DIST-nx driver
• I added MSMMUX-test2.c to show how to use MMUX with a daisy chained sensor (DIST-nx)

You can download it from here: [LINK].

The electrical specs of these things are pretty impressive: they can handle a load of max 10A at 18V, while only pulling 1mA from your NXT’s batteries. If you look at the picture on the left you’ll see the small cooling fin; I would suggest you keep that somewhere on the outside of your robot if you’re going to run that much power through it, though. This device is about 5×4 units big.

Their price will be $24.95 each and are due to be on the shelves around mid-June.

Using this Relay Driver, you can control up to 2 Relays using NXT.
Instead of Relays, you can control high current motors also.
While controlling motors, you can control speed as well.

Mindsensors NXTRelayDriver

GardenBot is a garden monitoring system. This means that you put sensors in your garden, and GardenBot will show you charts of the conditions in your garden — so you can see the world the way your plants see it.

With all the steps you need to build one of your own… the GardenBot is a great summer project. And, it’s easily expandable too. Add wireless, expand your garden size, make it solar powered… tweet your garden stats. The options are endless…

The biggest change is the way I am now handling the HiTechnic Sensor MUX. Rather than having to scan the SMUX for attached sensors, the individual sensor driver configures the SMUX for its specific port. This makes it much easier to use.

• Removed unnecessary common.h includes from examples
• Changed arrays from structs to just typedefs, all drivers have been adjusted
• Motor mux stuff split off from common.h
• All SMUX supported drivers now use new SMUX mechanism
• Modified common.h to separate SMUX functions from rest using defines
• Removed ubyteToInt from all drivers and common.h
• Test programs have had their sensor types reconfigured, you will need ROBOTC 2.26
• HTSMUX-driver.h newly added, has all the new SMUX functions split from common.h
• MMUX-common.h newly added, contains all the MMUX functions split from common.h
• Added min/max functions for floats
• light-common.h: newly added, adds RGBtoHSV conversion (thanks Mike Henning, Max Bareiss)
• HTCS-driver.h/HTCS2-driver.h: added functions for HSV values
• HTMC-driver.h: Improved relative heading algorithm
• Added DGPSreadTravHeading() to DGPS-driver.h and fixed commands
• Removed single axis functions from HTAC-driver.h
• Removed functions for single signal strength in HTIRS and HTIRS2.
• Removed No Wait functions from EOPD driver
• Removed HTIRL-NG, is now named HTIRL
• Changed arguments from byte to ubyte in MSLL-driver.h
• All applicable Mindsensors sensors now have an optional “address” argument that can be ommitted if using the default (thanks for the suggestion hedgepigdaniel)

Released: 3rd Party ROBOTC Driver Suite V2.0b1

•    Great fully 3D building envinronment with reflection and transparencies
•    You will see your model during loading time and can pause for instruction steps
•    You can modify and save models (lDraw/MLCad .dat compatible format)
•    Fast selecting/moving/adding/removing you’ll never see in MLCad
•    Copy/Rotation/Deletetion/Color change of single or multiple brick. Undo/Redo functionality
•    Real connections detection, not always the same near brick positioning
•    Brick selection by Block (means that solid connected bricks can be selected at once)
•    Grid positioning to speed up positioning of pieces
•    Automatic and precise positioning and orientering of most bricks according to connection detection
•    Automatic detection of rotation axles

64KB Flash
28KB+ RAM

This firmware includes the following updates:

1. Early support for some 4GB+ MicroSD cards (courtesy of community member KodeDaemon)
2. Early UsbClient support (requires deploy/debug via serial)
3. Pushbutton (SW1) now returns true when pushed, false when not pushed

This update also includes updates that were in the prior BETA releases… the complete list of all the upates can be found here on the Netduino forums.

Version: 4.1.1 BETA 1 (version 4.1.1.0 b1)

There is also a special “extra memory” edition of the v411 Beta firmware. It has 50% more available ram.

Version: 4.1.1 BETA 1 (version 4.1.1.0 b1) – 50% More Ram!

- March 9th:  Expanding Your Horizons (Maine Robotics Workshops) UMaine
- March 9th:  Summer Camp Fair, UMaine Field House, 1-4 pm
- March 20th:  Maine Youth Camp Association Summer Camp Fair, Portland, 1-4 pm
- April 30th:  Southern Maine Robot Track Meet, Auburn Middle School, 9 am
- May 7th:  Northern Maine Robot Track Meet, Maine Maritime Academy, 9 am

You can see more from Maine Robotics via there website:  Maine Robotics