ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Today we have a guest blog by the founders of EV3Lessons.com : "We are members of a FIRST LEGO League (FLL) team and the founders of EV3Lessons.com, a website with LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming tutorials for users of all levels. We have a complete set of beginner, intermediate and advanced lessons. We have a wide range of lessons from Moving Straight to My Blocks, Proportional Line Followers, Squaring on Lines, Color Line Followers, Calibration, and more. We continue to add and update the collection of lessons on the site. We are also adding resources that a user might need - such as basic robot build designs, worksheets and discussion guides for use in a classroom. Who uses our lessons? The target audience for the lessons is more than FIRST LEGO League Teams. The lessons are used by thousands of robotics teams, schools, boy scouts, and non-profits in 95 countries. We want our tutorials to be available to users around the world regardless of income level and, t...

You may know him as the guy who made the Timmyton that amazing shark like bot he brought to MakerFaire NY last year. But now builderdude35 has a new series of EV3 tutorial to present us. " Hello, everybody! I just wanted to let you all know that I have started a series of EV3 tutorials that I will be posting every Thursday (or Friday) on my YouTube channel, Builderdude35’s MINDSTORMS Creations: https://www.youtube.com/ channel/UCuXq-jiU0ANeBcF_ Tvq1D7g  In these tutorials, I discuss a topic and teach you how to implement it into an EV3 robot. Many of my tutorials are FLL related and aim to give some tips that could help you score more points on the mat.    You can watch one of my tutorials, “Building Your FLL Robot” right here: https://youtu.be/N5fzepIrFw8   Please don’t be afraid to give me any feedback, and if you know anyone who might benefit from seeing this video, go right ahead and share it with them! I would really appreciate it! You can also suggest future to...

At the FLL World Finals that took place end of April in St. Louis, USA, the first EV3 robot on the FLL pitch could be seen, called Echo Victor 3 : (C) Américo Verde As the authors (Lee Magpili, Américo Verde and Elizabeth Lam) state "The Project began as an exercise to see how EV3 would be on the FLL Field. So we would use as many new aspects of the EV3 platform as possible in order to show what can be done and whether or not there could be an advantage or not over the NXT platform.  From our observations, much of it will be about the build and strategy of the team, but there are things that are much easier to do and little things here and there that can help the team. X3 programming is a major improvement in usability and we hope that will help at least more of the beginner students. The ability to have four motors, (though not yet in the rules to do so) can really allow you to make some cool things happen with the robot and maybe even have much more autonomous beha...

Last Saturday I was at the biggest FLL Region finals in the Netherlands as the well known MINDSTORMS doctor, and there I got the Question;" How do I build a sturdy and good winning robot?" It is real hard to answer that question, as all missions are different and need different robot approaches, but some general rules do apply always. First I tell the teams that the robot with all sorts of odd angles to connect the tools is not the best, (so rather not use the standard 9797 base robot). I advice the kids to do the following regarding the caster wheel: " go to a shopping mall, take a shopping chart and place it on a free area, then turn all the wheels perpendicular to the forward direction. then use one finger and push forward. Observe where does the chart goo? straight ? so what do you think happens with your caster on your robot? indeed likely the same, so if the free moving direction is not secure, what does that tell us of the mission motions? , right so rethink you...

As a pre-season project, FLL team BEBO made a Claw Crane Arcade Game using LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT:

This weekend, the FIRST LEGO League 2011 European Finals are in full bloom in Delft, Netherlands. For those who can not be there in person, there's a Live Stream available where you can follow the competition. Best wishes to all the teams!

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 . See you there!

For all our Readers that are located somewhere in Central Europe, the Central European Finals for the FIRST LEGO League that take place today in World's largest computer museum, the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum in Paderborn (Germany), might be a worthwhile event to visit. More than twenty teams from Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Czechy, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland will compete for the first places that will allow them to take part at the FLL World Finals in April in St. Louis. For those who can't be at place there today, a live stream is available from the event starting with the Robot competition at 12.30 CET.

Here are the first pictures form the FLL World festival in Atlanta. FLL Opening Ceremony, with ice. LEGO show and help point. Interview on the Moon, with Steven C. for Moonbots.org Jay's Raching Machine SUMO BOTs, from Bryan Bonahoom (sorry about misidentifying them previously) Wall-E Bryan, Chris, Steve, and Mantis, in real and on the NXT Box. Flow chart of the AI program. 13 year old wrote a AI program in NXT-G. please feel free to stop by and talk with us. Martyn

With the FIRST LEGO League fast approaching, about a month away, the new NXTLog Challenge is Smart Move! From the NXTLog website: "Your challenge is to look at your community and discover how people, animals, information, and things travel. Once you know how people and things move in your community, pick one main mode of transportation and improve it through a MINDSTORMS NXT robot design prototype." All the standard rules apply; projects must be tagged "smartmove". Entries are due April 30th. Read more here . The FLL World Festival will be April 14-17 at the Georgia Dome, in Atlanta, Georgia. As always, some contributors to the NXT Step blog will be there, so be sure to drop by! Also, the FLL World Festival 2011 will be held in St. Louis! Read more about this year's World Festival here . Finally, next years' challenge has been released: Body Forward! Happy building! Richard

Saturday 6 Feb. 2010 at Papendal we attended the Dutch FLL final. and the winners are: Team 259, Smove; College Hageveld, Heemstede Team 127, Heroes on Tour; Herta-Lebenstein-Realschule, Stadtlohn (Germany) Team 176, WierdeWereldWegen; De Wierde, Almelo team 221, Mind Vermeer; Montessorischool Jan Vermeer, Delft Congratulation to all the winners, and good luck in Atlanta! Edit: See here for a section in the Dutch Kids News, ( Jeugd journaal )

Last Tuesday I gave a workshop at a group of 15 7-9 year olds at the school Wittering.nl . The kids already participated in the FLL and won places for the country final on February the 6th. The asked if I could help them in doing more with sensors, in their FLL robot. So we did a workshop in building and programing the 5 minute robot from NXTprograms.com . we also added an Ultrasonic sensor to detect the end of the line (actually the wall of the playing field) in the Smartmove mission. It was great fun and all groups build and programmed a good working robot, with the new color sensor, some even adapted the smooth line follow program to an old style lightsensor. Martyn

This weekend the FLL Smart Move region finals in Breda and Tilburg took place, I was there as "the Mindstorms Doctor, to help the teams in Distress". Demo in Breda with the new NXT 2.0 models. the two winning teams: Breda. Tilburg.

FLL season is upon us again, so I decided to post a tool that FLL teams (and other NXT users) may find useful. This Path Measurer project for NXT 1.0 and for NXT 2.0 gives you an easy way to plot and measure a path for your NXT to travel, so that you can quickly determine how many degrees to use as the duration for your Move and Motor blocks, for the portions of your navigation that use "dead reckoning". Hopefully this will save teams some time on this more tedious task and give them more time to spend on something else, like learning how to use sensors. As most teams knows, the degrees needed for segment durations depends on the actual robot used (wheel diameter and spacing, etc.), so it is best to determine this by experimenting with your actual robot. Mechanically, the Path Measurer is just a touch sensor on a wire, which you can hook up to your robot (any robot using the normal 2-motor drive) and use it as a wired remote control to guide the movement of the robot by...

For any FLL teams using the NXT 2.0 kit, note that the color sensor is not allowed in the FLL competition. The FLL rules allows for up to 2 "Light Sensors", and this refers to only the original NXT light sensor or the older RCX light sensor. The Color Sensor is not allowed, even if you only use it in "Light Sensor" mode. I verified this with FLL to be sure, and they confirmed. So if you have the NXT 2.0 kit, you can buy the original NXT light sensors separately from LEGO Retail or from LEGO Education .

Sometimes you need a basic robot vehicle that you can build quickly in order to run some experiments, or whatever. This Five Minute Bot for NXT 2.0 can be built very quickly, but it still has good basic driving and turning performance on smooth surfaces (not designed for carpet), so it should give you reasonably pure experiment results. This design is a variation on the NXT 1.0 Five Minute Bot project I posted last year, and although this one is designed for NXT 2.0, it can also be built with NXT 1.0 retail (8527). I hear that many FLL teams have found the 1.0 Five Minute Bot design useful for their teams to experiment with, for example, to start learning programming and driving/navigation before the team has designed their own robot, or just to get off the ground if they are having trouble getting started.

I do not normally blog about local events related to MINDSTORMS NXT here in New Zealand. However, given the increasing NZ readership the NXTStep has now, I thought I would mention some exiting events coming up. If you are in New Zealand and of school age and have access to a NXT kit, then this should be of interest to you: First one is this Saturday: The teams will be competing for trophies in Robot Rescue, Robot Dance and Robot Soccer. More details (including registration info / costs etc.) in here . I spoke to Mildie Meyer-Els from Toshiba (sponsor) – who has been working really hard getting everything organised. She is expecting big things this year. With over 100 teams competing on the day (of which 55 will be competing for the Auckland titles and the rest competing against the Auckland winners for the national Competition in the afternoon), this should be an exciting event tomorrow. I will certainly be there – feel free to twitter me at the event if you want to meet up. The...

Teams have begun receiving the mats and mission models for this years challenge, Smart Move! Over on Techbrick , they have posted some resources that includes this years mat layout and CAD images of the mission models, as well as planning worksheets, and team info sheets. Go check them out! Also, artificialintelligence over on NXTasy posted some pictures of a real table with the missions sitting on them... looks good! More information on Smart Move on the FIRST website - interesting to see that they have already released next year's (2010) challenge, Biomedical ! The kickoff with the release of the challenge mission rules is September 3! Can't wait! Meanwhile, debate what you think the missions might be on the comments or in the forums. Looking to a fun year, good luck! Richard

Using the missions from this year's FLL challenge, Climate Connections, solve them and enter your robot in this NXTLog challenge. Don't have the missions? Make up your own, and build a robot to complete them! Full details: http://mindstorms.lego.com/nxtlog/ProjectDisplay.aspx?id=b1c98d61-dd7c-49bc-83c7-f77ac83bc062 Enjoy and good luck! Richard

I recently came across this on Youtube. and the second part, that shows you how to setup the enviroment. This seems really interesting, and I think could be a big help to FLL teams... if anyone tries it, let us (or the poster at least) know how it goes! Happy New Year to everyone, Richard