Purchasing the 2009 controller

[whytheheckme]

Originally Posted by Danny Diaz

Obviously when you play with the NXT in FLL you wouldn't have an OI, everything you do is partially autonomous and you interact with the robot via its screen. But FLL is the exception rather than the rule.

For everything else, yes, you'd want to use SOME kind of laptop/computer interface for an OI, and you'd perform direct communicate with the NXT either via Bluetooth or tether via USB. For demos and stuff where you want to be uber cool, you can certainly use another NXT for controlling your robot using the NXT brick-to-brick communications - I don't recommend it normally, though, since you're eating 2 sets of batteries in that situation instead of 1 set; leave that for PR demo purposes only. Plus, if you want to use a USB joystick (or XBox gamepad via USB, or other USB controllers), all you need to do is plug the USB joystick into your laptop (and make sure all necessary drivers are installed) and then use the joystick VIs provided by LabVIEW and you've got instant programming access to your joystick. Some of the engineers here at NI even got a Wii-mote interface to work with LabVIEW, so I'm interested in playing with that a bit myself.

I recommend you play with a laptop controlling the NXT directly via the USB tether connection with a USB joystick/gamepad, especially if you have any sensors on your NXT you want to play with. Remember that the communication stream is pretty slow when using Bluetooth, so feeding data like accelerometer or gyro data back to the laptop via Bluetooth is not going to be impressive at all, but via USB tether it'll be really nice.

-Danny

Sweet.

So I got my hands on an NXT. Should I just simply install LabView, and download the toolkit? Once I do, where should I get started? Is there some kind of getting started guide for LabView+NXT?

Geez I feel like a n00b.

Jacob