Lego NXT Hitechnics Sensors

stevesmythe

Senior Member
Seven years later ....... !

Seeing that these boards are currently half-price, I bought one to experiment with. Reading the NXT sensors is well-documented in this thread and easy to understand.

However, can someone provide some more detail about what is the intended use of the "slave" mode (i.e. a "virtual sensor")? I don't understand what you would connect to the AXE216 board, and what would be sent to the NXT Brick. Could you, for example, connect a different sort of I2C sensor to the Picaxe so that the NXT Brick would be able to read it? If so, how would the NXT Brick interpret the data received? How do you know what to set the slave address to? Has anybody got any examples of doing this?
 

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
A virtual sensor would be like taking a NXT Temperature Sensor and replacing that with an AXE216 board with a thermistor wired to it. The PICAXE acts as the NXT Temperature Sensor, a 'virtual sensor'.

As to I2C Addresses and any protocol; I recall that comes down to what the NXT Controller thinks it's dealing with. I believe we intended the hardware to be available and potentially useful for those who wanted to create virtual sensors, had an idea of how to do it, and weren't much concerned beyond that.

There used to be a Lego NXT homebrew sensor scene a while ago which is perhaps still going and much of their stuff should still be online. They will likely be the best source of information on 'how to do it'.
 

stevesmythe

Senior Member
OK, thanks. I'll delve around in the NXT sensor community. I was thinking that, as the EV3 Brick can read NXT I2C sensors, it would also therefore be able to read the Picaxe virtual sensor. So the board wouldn't just be good for legacy NXT hardware.

[EDIT]
I found this page on using a PIC prototype board as a virtual sensor. That seems a good starting point.
 
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