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BumpConnect is coming back!!

Hey all, David here.

As many of you know, all of us here at Barobo have been working hard on improving the stability and user-experience of Linkbot Labs. We started the process almost two years ago when our devs collectively decided that it was time to redesign and re-engineer our entire software stack, all they way from the firmware on the robots to the Linkbot Labs experience today.

During the rewrite, BumpConnect was temporarily postponed, but no longer! BumpConnect is BACK!

To those of you just joining us, “BumpConnect” is a connection method that lets you control Linkbot modules with other Linkbot modules. Here’s how it works:

  1. Take two Linkbot modules.

  2. Press and hold the “B” button on the module you want to be the controller.

  3. Next, press and hold the “B” button on the module you want to be controlled.

  4. Bump the robots together

  5. Your robots are now “paired” together!

Upon pairing, the robots enter an “idle” state. Press the “B” button on the controller once to enter “Tilt-Drive” mode. In Tilt-Drive mode, you can tilt the controller Linkbot forward, backward, and side to side to make the controlled robot move. With this control mode, you can put some wheels on the controlled robot and drive it around like a remote controlled car.

If you press the “B” button again on the controller Linkbot, you will enter “Copy-Cat” mode. In this mode, the controlled robot will do its best to copy the motor positions of the controller Linkbot. Try moving the motors around on the controller Linkbot and watch the second Linkbot copy your motions!

If you press the “B” button again, it will go back to the initial “idle” mode.

If you want a sneak preview of BumpConnect, follow these intructions:

  1. Open Linkbot Labs

  2. Click on the “?” button/icon at the top right of the screen.

  3. Click on the link “Linkbot Labs Development Site”. This will send you to our bleeding edge dev site where we work on and test our newest technologies.

  4. Connect a robot to your computer with a USB cable and turn it on.

  5. Linkbot Labs should automatically tell you that you need to update the firmware on the robot. If this does not happen immediately, give Linkbot Labs a few minutes to download the latest firmware files from our repository on the web. This should happen automatically in the background.

  6. Update the firmware on any robots you want to use BumpConnect on and BumpConnect away!

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