NXT Elevator

Nice construction of an elevator. It has four floors (I think!), it can open and close doors and has the intelligence to remember the order of buttons pressed to go to which floor!

Lego Microwave

This is a video of a Lego Mindstorms microwave. I know it uses a older type touch sensor but by pressing it by a certain amount of times it will set the time by adding 5 seconds. Really cool!!!

World Plotter

This robot draws nearly the entire world on a blank white ball. For this robot the coordinates of the continents were prepared as a zigzag line, drawn with a green felt tip pen. After the continents are drawn the robot switches colors from green to black. With this pen the continents are labeled, AS for Asia, AF for Africa, NA for North America, SA for South America and EU for the European Union. After switching to the blue pen the oceans are labeled, PAC for the Pacific, ATL for the Atlantic, IND for the Indian Ocean.








This is a really cool post on the Lego Mindstorms webpage about a robot that draws out the continents and labels them. Go to the link to see more info!
Also Mike (the person that made the robot) has made many, many other plotters. They are all cool in their own way.

Useless Machine

Hello,
This is a machine though it is not related to mindstorms it may help in gearing and clockwork for robots
It uses a series of gears to work.

Serendipity NXT boat

Hello all,
I stumbled a really cool video and post about Serendipity.
Here's the post:
Claude Baumann and his students have produced yet another outstanding combination of LEGO engineering, digital hardware prototyping, and innovative programming. Taking inspiration from some of the LEGO boats that have come along in the past, the team set out to make a LEGO boat that could cross a significant sized lake. The result was Serendipity, a autonomous waypoint-navigating craft with a custom GPS sensor.

In their normal fashion, they've provided

a detailed log of their progress on this project, from beginning to end - and it's something I'd really suggest any budding engineer (LEGO or otherwise) read. A lot of people look at an end result and are amazed by it... but the really amazing thing to me is the process to get to it. The inspiration, the wrong turns, the problems anticipated and the surprises learned the hard way. Claude's team has done an admirable job documenting all this, and for anyone who's been involved in such a project it's enlightening to see (and a great way to teach young engineers).

The basic boat was a simple catamaran using two of the stock LEGO motors at the rear on a pivoting mount as a sort of "powered tiller". With a compass to determine the boat heading the only thing they lacked was an absolute positioning system... so they made their own GPS sensor. With this they programmed the boat to do a waypoint navigation on the surface of a large reservoir... it work work flawlessly! To put this in context, the Serendipity is about 38 cm long, and traveled an 800 meter course from shore to shore.

That's the equivalent of a 16' boat traveling more than 16 miles (2,100 boat lengths). Not too shabby, especially considering that waves to not "scale down" nearly as nicely, so while it seems to have been a calm day... those are still significant waves for such a small boat! It also points out the efficiency of the LEGO boat motors: two of them (each running on a single AA battery) had enough power to thrust continuously for 40 minutes. I'm not sure what the total running time is... but it's clearly significant, and that was pushing the boat at good speed!

There's also a nice YT video of it up, if you want to see the "movie version". Now, if I could just get a calm enough lake and a GPS sensor... well, if I didn't have ideas before, I certainly would now :).

PS- There will be a series of boat races again at this years Brickworld event in Chicago, so there may be more of this "risking LEGO inches above the water" coming in the near future.

NXT Videos

These are two videos of bonus models that so far have not been out on the website yet.
This one is a "Bug" robot
http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/funzone/movies/Bonus%20Models.aspx
And a rover-like robot
http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/funzone/movies/Bonus%20Models.aspx
Enjoy!!!

Four Delta Robots

These are four Lego Flex pickers which is based on the ABB Felxpicker Industrial pick and place robot.

If you want to know more go to
http://tinkernology.blogspot.com/2011/04/four-lego-delta-robots.html
for more information.

NXT Camera

(A nice little camera made for the NXT.
It is a pinhole camera like the older types. It uses a 35mm film and the pinhole is quickly opened to expose the film.
The NXT also winds the film for another shot)

Megaminxer UPDATE

Newer Version of the MEGAMINXER

Super Power Megaminx Solver!!!

Okay, So you've seen robots solve Rubik's cubes.
But this is just awesome..

The Megaminx is a dodecahedron with 12 faces, each with 5 edges. Each face can be rotated in a similar way to the well-known Rubik's Cube puzzle.
The robot itself is built out of LEGO using a Mindstorms NXT kit for driving the mechanics. An HTC Desire smartphone running a custom Android app is the brain of the solver. The app uses the phone's camera to capture images of each face of the Megaminx which it then processes to determine the colors of the scrambled puzzle. After working out the solution, the app transmits the moves to the NXT controller via bluetooth to instruct it to solve the Magaminx.

OMG you have to see this: