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I found an old website of mine: NXTPad. It’s a website about a Windows mobile app for controlling a LEGO Mindstorms NXT Brick remotely. I made it 10 years ago and I had totally forgotten that it was out there. Google analytics showed there were no visitors anymore, I took it offline. But first I copied the content of the homepage into this post. Does the world need a new NXTPad? One that runs on Droids and iPhones? Whatever the answer, here’s the main text of that site as an ‘in memoriam’.
NXTPad is a free open source windows mobile application for proportionally controlling the NXT brick via bluetooth. It should run on any PPC with WM5 or WM6. NXTPad sends a text string with steering directions to the NXT brick. In the NXT Brick you can then convert the string to numbers. After splitting the numbers you can wire the numbers in to your motor controls. The conversion is done using the the custom text manipulation blocks or the custom myblock in the download section.
Example NXTPad output string:
| characters
| function
| range
|
| 1
| direction
| 0-1
|
| 3-6
| steering
| -100 to 100
|
| 8-11
| power
| 0 to 100
|
| 13-16
| x coordinate
| -100 to 100
|
| 18-21
| y coordinate
| -100 to 100
|
| 23-26
| action button statuses
| byte, binary.
|
| 28
| action button held down
| 0 (nothing pressed)to 4 (button 4 held) |
Here’s a video.
Hello. my name is Oleg. I’m a robotics teacher at school. One of the training constructors is NXT. This program is interesting to me, because there are no remote controls in NXT. If the program is can I use it as a lesson? This program allows you to manage 16 different jobs in one room, so. so they don’t get in each other’s way? Thank you very much for your work. With respect Oleg.
It’s rather hard to use in a classroom setting. You’d also need a lot of windows mobile 6 devices. I don’t think you can find that anymore. I am working on a project called pybricks that might have support for NXT in the future.