ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

We just had a good discussion over at theNXTclassroom.com mailing list about creating custom graphics for your MyBlocks. It turns out that the icons for the MyBlocks are in .png format and can be found in: .../Program Files/LEGO MINDSTORMS Edu NXT/engine/Icons/MyBlocks (or remove the Edu if you have the retail version) I needed to delete one of the existing icons to keep it to 72 files (6x12 grid of possible icons in the editor) before adding my own. Now I just need to figure out how to make this block actually work! :) *clipart from openclipart.org -- Damien Kee www.damienkee.com

The Multi-Bot project for NXT 2.0 from nxtprograms.com is a robot vehicle that can take a number of different forms, including taking on several different modular attachments that can be used individually or combined in various ways, all using a single NXT 2.0 (8547) kit, or equivalent/replacement parts from other NXT/Technic kits. Multi-Bot was designed to be a flexible "teaching robot" of sorts for NXT 2.0, especially as an aid to learning NXT-G programming, as you can use it to do a lot of classic robot vehicle tasks and expand it to do your own tasks. Home users of NXT 2.0 might find it a good way to learn about the basics of robotic vehicles, and especially in conjunction with the CD (see below) as a good way to learn a lot of NXT-G programming. FLL teams that have the 2.0 retail kit (8547) or equivalent parts and software might also be interested in using it as an educational tool before the regular FLL season starts or at the beginning of the season. Building ins

If you are a FIRST team member, parent, coach, or just a plain fan of this great robotics competition, please consider voting for FIRST in the American Express MembersProject. Voting does not require that you have an AmEx card, and registration is free. You must be 18 or older to register and vote - if you're under age 18, consider asking your parent or teacher to vote. The winner will get $200,000 - FIRST is a non-profit and has many supporters, including large companies that donate funds... BUT that doesn't mean that FIRST can't use the funds. You can read more info here .

Jetro informed me that Hispabrick Magazine has just released their eighth issue. You can view the magazine online using this link , or download the complete PDF by going to this link , and clicking "HM008 - English". Each of these options are free of charge. Hispabrick Magazine is about LEGO in general, but this issue is especially an interesting read for MINDSTORMS owners, as several articles focus explicitly on MINDSTORMS NXT. You will find an article about the MINDSTORMS Community Partners, as well as interviews with three of them, including Xander Soldaat, Fay Rhodes and me. Furthermore, you'll find a tutorial: "A PID Controller for LEGO MINDSTORMS Robots". Finally, the article "Actuators for the NXT" talks about several actuators, including the new FIRGELLI Linear Actuators. The issue also covers non MINDSTORMS topics, like Technic, Space, as well as reviews of new LEGO sets. You may also want to read the interview with Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, th

Fantastic checkers playing robot that popped up on YouTube It's a little slow, but makes up for it with the fact that it has regular NXt motors, Linear Actuators and Pneumatics all in the one design! From their YouTube page: This mindstorms robot checkers can play checkers against itself, with a person, another robot, or with a computer. Language: Matlab (robot vision), C (checkers engine), NXC (inverse kinetic done here, could have done in Matlab) Hardware: Microsoft webcam 2 motors for x and y (inverse kinetic) 1 motor for linear actuator (low or raise the piece) 1 motor to switch the pneumatics (grab the piece) 1 motor to provide air pressure to the tank 1 NXTMMX mux to control 2 additional motors. -- Damien Kee www.damienkee.com

One of the authors of GeekDad, Wired, has reviewed my new book, The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Discovery Book: a Beginner's Guide to Building and Programming Robots . The author of the review notes that the book "should come with every MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Kit," and goes on to say that the book is "not simply an instruction manual, it is a book to facilitate learning and understanding." The review goes on to say many more great things about the book. Read the full review by clicking this link . The Discovery Book, which came out in May, has been selling very well since. As of this writing, the book has received 17 five-star reviews on various Amazon divisions, and several more reviews have been posted to other places on the web. You can read all about the book on it's companion website . Thanks to all of you who gave me feedback about the book, either through reviews or by sending an email. Because of this feedback, I've learned that there is no age limit for

Since the MINDSTORMS website was updated to cover the NXT 2.0 set, the downloadable instructions for several older designs were missing. It seems that the instructions, including those for the Classic Clock, and the NXT 1.0 robot arm have been uploaded to the download section of the new website. You can find them using this link .

This thing is enormous!! 9 NXT's controlling 16 XL power functions motors Some days I wish I had enough LEGO / spare time to do a project this big. -- Damien Kee www.damienkee.com

As I posted about a while ago, I've been interested in making a quadruped robot with animal-like motions. I started working on different designs earlier this summer, but haven't been able to get something that works because of the sheer number of motors involved and the expense of TETRIX parts. (i.e. about $80 for a single rotation sensor!). However, while I was working on robot prototypes, I ran into an interesting problem with NXT-NXT communications. In one of my designs I wanted to use three NXT bricks which would all need to communicate with each other. But RobotC, the programming language I was using, only supports Bluetooth communication between two NXTs. To get around this problem, I looked into ways to hardwire the NXTs together; there are some pretty amazing homebrew solutions out there that various people have come up with. However, as I lack the technical/electronics skills required to make such devices, I looked for a way to do it purely with NXT pieces. I came up w

What do you get when you make a room-sized robotic chess set based entirely on LEGO and unveil it at a major LEGO convention? A scheduling problem. Monster Chess went over wonderfully at Brickworld , drawing large crowds, playing multiple games, and winning acclamation & awards. It was so well-liked that LEGO requested it almost immediately... but other venues (such as Makerfaire in Detroit on 31 Jul & 1 Aug, 2010) had also already booked it. With a double-booked tour schedule, what's a Monster Chess set to do? Clone itself. LEGO was interested enough in having it at some events that they were able to dig up parts to make a copy of this huge creation. But with less than a week, the challenge was to assemble more than 73,000 individual pieces into a single master creation: no easy feat. So when a shipping pallet with 412 pounds of LEGO arrived at Steve Hassenplug's door, he did what came naturally to him: called on his friends. Over the course of the 17 Jul weekend,

There's a new NXT bonus model available on the official LEGO® MINDSTORMS site : the Archerfish by Fay Rhodes. Read more about it here . Well done again, Fay!

The NXTLog Challenge this summer is to build a robotic pet! Real and made up animals are all allowed. Awarded categories will be: Domestic Pets, Exotic Pets, Creative Pets, and Interactive Pets. The deadline is August 31! Read more about the challenge here . You might find inspiration from Fay's LEGO MINDSTORMS ZOO or Robots Alive! Endangered Species books, as well as the Internet. Good luck and happy building! Richard

Received the following from Andreas: "I built a Lego NXT wall-e transformable fully self controlled, it uses Lego Mindstorms programming environment. The video shows the transformation which is quite similar to the original wall-e. It is for all I know the first in Lego build look-alike which is capable to transform automated. " Nice work, Andreas! Video below and more information can be found here :

Received the information from John O. of Microsoft - I'm including the entire thing here, un-edited, for those interested in Microsoft's Robotics Developer Studio. ----- Full Disclosure – I am an employee of Microsoft Corporation with an interest in robotics and also am a big fan of Lego Mindstorms and Lego Technics and am patiently waiting for my two young boys to get a bit older so they can discover the fun of building with Lego Technics. You may have heard that Microsoft has a robotics systems of their own which is now free to download and use at http://www.microsoft.com/ robotics You may have also heard that it also comes with a simulator so that you can simulate robotics in many different simulated environments such as a house, factory and city. Recently we have ran competitions where contestants were required to drive a simulated Mars rover and drive a car through a simulated city whilst obeying all the rules of the road. However did you know that since its initial r

I received an email this morning from Dr.Christoph Bartneck at Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. He informed me about a new spoken language in development: ROILA is a spoken language for robots. It is constructed to make it easy for humans to learn, but also easy for the robots to understand. ROILA is optimized for the robots’ automatic speech recognition and understanding. We provide open source software that allows your Lego robot to understand ROILA. We are currently also working on enabling your robots to speak ROILA. Check out our website at http://roila.org/ Take a look - and be sure to let the team know what you think. Reading down the blog a bit, you'll see that they're asking for testers, too... if anyone gives it a try, let me know! I'd love to have a few testers share their experiences with us via a guest blog post.

Remember Damien Kee's post " NXT powered by solar "? Well here is another sneak peek at Dexter's upcoming dSolar. This time by one of Dexter's official beta tester and Teen Fan Of LEGO Mindstroms, Joey --who presented us last time the dPressure sensor from Dexter Industries -- strikes again with an exclusive review that can be found on his new website: www.lego-x.com Check out the video he made showing us the different components, how to plug them together and for the first time* see an NXT powered without batteries! * I think others may have successfully done this before, but to my knowledge, this is the first to be commercially available solution. 

In color, just like the paperback version. Order link and more details are here. The book requires the free software, "Adobe Digital Editions", available here.

I consider myself a happy person and this news makes me even happier. I like LEGO and I also like re-creating and saving LEGO contraptions with a CAD setup. You might have seen products of such a setup in the form of building instructions shared on the web or in several MINDSTORMS books available on the shelves. My setup of choice is LDraw and MLCad and both have inhabited my PCs for over 12 years. These are excellent free programs and are supported by a fantastic group of developers that work with an impeccable attention to the details. Their work really shows in the building instructions that can be created. Updates and new versions are always big news...maybe this is one of the bigger times things are coming together. MLCad version 3.30 is released to the world and the LDraw 2010-02 Parts Update is now available containing a great number of new finely-crafted official CAD parts. Installing the software can be a bit tricky sometimes but help can be found in a few books (inc

This month, Lego Education is offering a 10% discount on parts packs—and they are offering more parts than ever. Here are some examples of what you'll find: Find these packs—and many more— here.

Now available is the CD LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 by Example , which contains the NXT 2.0 projects from nxtprograms.com in convenient CD format plus exclusive bonus projects and bonus material. Designed to be both fun and educational, the CD is intended for users of the NXT 2.0 (8547) kit (NXT 1.0 users see the CD 65 Fun Projects for your LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT ). In addition to the 23 NXT 2.0 Projects on nxtprograms.com, the CD also contains the following exclusive bonus content: Over 70 ready-to-run and fully commented NXT-G programs for the new Multi-Bot project, for both fun and programming education (beginner to advanced). Studying and using these programs will provide an extensive education in NXT-G programming, including a variety of techniques for motor control, sensor usage, and more (see the program descriptions ). A new Vending Machine project. The Pinball Machine project (demonstrated at the LEGO booth at FLL World Festival 2009). The full version of the Guitar Challenge

I was very fortunate to be a part of the organising team responsible for this years RoboCup Junior competition. I was in charge of the Rescue division and this year in Singapore it was the largest competition we have ever had. The local Singapore organisers did an amazing job, with so many enthusiastic students from the Polytechnic volunteering to be our referees. Thanks guys, we couldn't have done it without you! Stats (rescue section) - 100 Teams - 27 different countries - 250+ students - 6 competition fields - 4 practice fields - 7 rounds each - 20 + victims (softdrink cans) - More fun than could ever be measured! Here's a little video I put together of the 4 days of competition. Bring on RoboCup Junior 2011 - Istanbul! -- Damien Kee www.damienkee.com

Sweet! HiTechnic's turn with HTWay ... a two-wheeled, self-balancing, Segway like marvel with a nice added feature...Power Functions remote control! At this point the HTWay requires a HiTechnic Gyro Sensor, a HiTechnic IRReceiver, and a LEGO Power Functions IR Remote Control. Programs for both NXT-G 2.0 and NXC are available. With the integrated wheel-size setting menu users have an interesting option. The provided programs can also be altered for exchange or integration of different sensors to fit specific needs. HiTechnic has posted HTWay's detailed instructions (including building/ programming steps) and a nice back-history of self-balancing pBricks from the beginning. Be sure to see the video! I've always loved the way 'AllTheseWays' look like nothing is happening when they are performing at their best...for me anyway...just standing there. Chris

Fana'Briques 2010 's topic was "Space", so I brought along two LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT astronauts, the NXTronauts :

David Perdue, besides being an NXT author, has done an excellent job of keeping all the NXT-related books in an easy-to-find location... and he's updated his site with a new format... check it out here . His site now features the ability to view a publishers complete library by clicking the publisher's name on the menu bar. He's also welcoming suggestions for his new site. Thanks for doing this, David!

Got an email from Boris about a recent project of his involving the NXT and the Android mobile phone operating system... he's got a nice writeup here with video. Check it out and let him know what you think.