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NXT-G 2.0 : Datalogging

I was very lucky to attend one of the recent LEGO engineering conferences in Brisbane, organised by LEGO Education and presented by Melissa Pickering from Tufts University (home of RoboLab)

One of the highlights was a quick demonstration of NXT-G 2.0, which will include a specific datalogging section. No screenshots are available as the graphical interface is still under development, but they are looking at a January 2009 release date.

It looks great and has two levels to it that I could make out. The first level requires no blocks whatsoever, rather it opens a dialog box asking what sensors you have connected to each port and for how long you wish to sample. This suits a handheld logging experiment as you cannot move motors or perform other actions while logging. The second level introduces a 'datalogging' block which does the same thing, and include it with all your regular blocks in your program so you could drive a robot around, collect some data, move to another spot and collect some more data etc.

If you are connected to your computer when taking data (bluetooth or USB)
NXT-G 2.0 will show a realtime graph of the data being collected. One of the nifty features they showed was the 'predict' mode, whereby teachers could pose a question about what shape a data set would look like, students could then 'predict' what the data would look like by using a pencil tool to draw it out, and then run the experiment over the predicted data to see how closely they matched. All data will be exportable in text file format for analysis with other programs (excel etc)

The other big change that was presented was 'exportable' myblocks. This means that if you are using myblocks, you just save your file as normal, email it to whoever you want, and the program will run without needing to send the individual myblocks as well.

NXT-G 2.0 is being released by LEGO Education, not LEGO Retail, so it may be a little more difficult to find. They will be including 4 projects with the software, the most impressive being a probe dipper that can raise/lower a probe into a beaker and also rotate between beakers.

Overall it looks great and I can't wait to get my hands on it.

--
Damien Kee
www.domabotics.com

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