by Danny Staple

Well first - I would like to say Gung Hei Fat Choi, that is, Happy Chinese New Year. You may have noticed things are a bit slow on OrionRobots at the moment, this is because I am preparing for a new phase with a better looking design, new features and in preparation for some changes. We will be considering our hosting setup, for which a number of options have presented themselves, and we may even alter the underlying CMS software.

I also watched, with some fun, the Iron Mecha competition on Lugnet.mecha.

I am waiting, with anticipation, who will be in the 100 lucky Lego people who will be in the extended Mindstorms Developers Panel (MDP). I do not know what my chances are, but I would certainly be honoured to be part of it. Good luck to all those who have hopefully applied for this.

The NXT is most definitely a welcome addition to the wealth of robot kits and devices in the hobby. Meanwhile, there has been some investigation of the use of bluetooth with the ooPIC. Maybe using an I2C based bluetooth adaptor, then the ooPIC and the NXT could be combined. There are those who are already looking to put an IR serial port to Bluetooth adaptor as well, so the NXT and the RCX have a chance of working together.

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