Pancake Robot

This is awesome!!!

More details on his blog - http://makermig.blogspot.com/2011/06/how-pancake-bot-works.html

Brickword

Brickworld 2011 has recently wrapped up in Chicago.

Shep won the 'Best Mechanical' build for his awesome Flexpicker.

You can read all about the flexpicker here, as well as all the fine details about how it was put together etc.

Theo Jansen inspired robot

Guest Post from Oschoe.  Not strictly an NXT robot, but as it uses PowerFunction motors and receivers it wouldn't be difficult to automate it!

I am fascinated with designing and building mechanisms that move, favorably without the use of wheels... I love stepping, folding, rotating, walking, jumping, flying and squirming mechanisms that move. This blog shows one of my tries in building a bot moving in an unorthodox way...

When I started actually building my designs I looked around for easily available, reusable components with sufficient technical components and controller possibilities and I ran into the LEGO Mindstorms series. After a few try-outs I started building simple multi-legs steppers with synchronized leg-movement. If you are interested; check my youtube channel

The design

A while ago I ran into the moving artwork by a Dutch artist named Theo Jansen, "het strandbeest". After re-watching the various (mostly lousy quality) movies on the web I decided to take the basics of the design and build my own version of a walking-bot.

The build

I started off with a very simple drawing of the legs and the motion required. After some trial and error with the ratio's of the legs I managed to get the basic movement just right. After collecting enough of the right pieces  I tried to build a 6legged version but getting that to run stable proved difficult. I decided to add two more legs and that made it run much more smooth. After a couple of runs of the 8-legged version it was obvious the legs did not have enough grip on the surface of the test area (my table :-)) I added 'feet'; the parts touching the surface are made of rubber and that did the trick.

For anyone interested in more building details ; check the 'stills' halfway the movie for hints.

Thermal sensor

Hi,
Dexter Industries have just released their latest sensor for the NXT, the Thermal Infrared Sensor.

From their webpage -

The Dexter Industries Thermal Infrared Sensor reads surface temperatures of objects. It is a non-contact thermometer based on the MLX90614. Detecting the infrared radiation from an object, the sensor can read object temperatures between -90°F and 700°F (-70°C and +380°C). The sensor has a high accuracy of 0.5°C and a resolution of 0.02°C. 
The Thermal Infrared Sensor reads both the ambient temperature (the temperature of the air around the sensor) and the surface temperature of the object that the sensor is pointed towards. 
The sensor can detect a flame at a range of 2 meters.

Xander has already done some cool things with his sensor.

How would you use this sensor?  Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Random Robots

Hello,
These are two robots that I have selected because of what they can do. It also might inspire some NXT ideas.
First Justin, a robot built by the space agency of Germany demonstrates how it can catch balls and make coffee.

Then a butler robot that brings cups of water over to judges. It was made in a contest to see how fast and
much much water was left in the cup. So do it fast and don't spill anything!

Posting

Hello all,
I will now be only posting over the weekend so it will only be updated on Sat. or Sun.
Thanks!
Enjoy

GPS Thing

Jim Kelly has teamed up with Dexter Industries to produce a new book aimed at the using the dGPS sensor.

Satellite GPS systems have become more and more integrated in the way we live.  As our world becomes increasingly dependent on the Global Positioning System, it was obvious to us that the next generation of scientists and engineers will need to know how to use it and what its limitations are.     This workbook was written to bring to life the GPS system that we often take for granted, and help students understand it, explore it, and find new ways to use it.   

Thermal sensor

Having spent most of yesterday hacking and optimizing the firmware for the new Dexter Industries Thermal IR Sensor, Xander thought he would go ahead and make something fun with it today.
he built a pan and tilt rig for the sensor with a great deal of gearing down to allow me to take a lot of measurements as the rig moved around. Initially he had it set for about 40×40 measurements but those didn’t look that great and he wanted a bit more. He reprogrammed it and made it spit out data at a resolution of about 90×80.

He gets some great looking images of both a cold bottle and a hot flame.

From what I hear, he's working on increasing the resolution and range that the sensor can output.

LEGO StarWars Lambda Class-T 4a #10212 NXTfied!

This is a vid of the lego set NXTfied!

Storing Lego mindstorms

Hi, these are some examples of how to store your lego pieces. Pictures shows how the labels are on the storage case, and some are opened to show how they works and what's inside them. I hope some of the other people will use this, because it are very easy to get the pieces you want when you build. I have use this system for my other Lego pieces to, but have only taken photos of the NXT parts. Some few NXT parts like cabels, and the big balls you get in NXT 1, are in a bigger box, but haven't pictured it, because it are only one label. (To get the parts I have used a combination of: LDD, MLcad and LeoCad, and printed out from word)

Storing LEGO MINDSTORMS #2

This is  the T-BOXX from Sortimo.





What's useful about these boxes, is that you can choose how you organize the seperate bins within the box.





A

Segaway

What do you do when you're in the MINDSTORMS booth at the FLL finals with plenty of robots around? Well, it might lead to some strange combinations. At some point Laurens got the idea to combine a NXT Segway with omniwheels so that it could move sideways. In theory, this shouldn't have any influence on the robot's balance. See the practical experiment Xander and Laurens did below.




Laurens decided to try to see what happens when a segaway is on a moving platform.

So this is the result:

Cool Car

Hi there,
I found some model of a car on youtube.
It's pretty cool!!!

Bonus Models

Hi all,
I know this is quite late but some of you out there at one point or another can't think of anything to build. www.nxtprograms.com has no new updates, the stuff on the web is too simple or too hard.
Well, following this post there will be several posts for each on the Lego bonus models.

Play well!

FLL OEC 2011: Delft (NL)

Today the first of the 500 guest are arriving in the Netherlands to participate on Friday 3 and Saturday 4 June at the FLL Open European Championships in Delft (the Netherlands).
With a LEGO MINDSTORMS Team we will be showing of some great models and always there for tips and tricks.

Join the FLL OEC Facebook group to share your news and videos, and to chat with other teams!

See this link for the official pages.
Here you can find the complete program.

Google Zeitgeist, London

Tuesday 16 May, Jorgen Vig Knudstrop (CEO and President, LEGO) talked about Game-Changing entertainment at the Google Zeitgeist 2011 event.
Jorgen refers to us the fans that make the brand.


full movie (as shown on Jorgen's phone).



We helped LEGO to show several interesting LEGO MINDSTORMS models, sumobot (by LEGO)

Soccerbots with helmets (by NeXTStorms)


Streetview car (by Mark)


C5 (by university students Kenneth Madsen and Lasse Lauesen).


It was nice to see that many CEO's loved to play with the soccerbots.