ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Gijs and his cousin just finished building this really impressive roller coaster, best part of it? It's controlled by MINDSTORMS EV3 :) The roller coaster is EV3 powered, it uses a color sensor for sensing the arrival of a train and then initializes the Mindstorms program loop. Visitors are being sent on a mission to an alien world. After they get launched into space they orbit a potentially interesting planet and initialize the landing. Once landed they find a dangerous world with enormous monsters. A giant sand worm eats them at the end of the ride. Video made by Motiontales ( http://motiontales.nl ). If you have an amazing project powered by MINDSTORMS do let us know so we can feature you too on The NXT Step (is EV3) : . .

About a year ago, I blogged about datalogging acceleration profiles of several rides at Walt Disney World, using the HiTechnic accelerometer and the NXT. Well the story doesn't end there. I mentioned this information on a Disney fan site, where not only were people interested in the results, but asked for more - particularly a ride called Rockin' Rollercoaster, which uses a linear motor to shoot the train forward at high acceleration straight into a loop. The problem was this coaster exceeds the 2.5 G limit of the Hitechnic accelerometer, so I decided to try again, using the "Version 3" accelerometer from Mindsensors , that can reportedly measure up to 10 G's. Mindsensors very graciously providing me with a unit to test, and I thought this would be the ideal way to do it... subjecting the hardware (& myself) to high-G rides, and review a sensor in the process. The Mindsensors newest accelerometer was mentioned here back in August: it has a user-selectable ...

A really cool LEGO project concept is the Great Ball Contraption ( video , recent blogs , Google ), where you design a series of modules ( general examples , NXT examples ) to move small LEGO sports balls around. Talking some inspiration from this, here is a variation that you might try for a fun challenge with your NXT set and any other LEGO parts you have to add to it: Move the larger NXT balls around, and for an extra challenge, make the motion continuous so that the balls each travel in a continuous path in, around, and/or through and back to the start of your machine without any human help. Never mind about modules and standards for multiple builders for now, just see how interesting of a way you can come up with to keep the NXT balls in continuous motion. Here is an example NXT Ball Roller Coaster with building instructions for a single NXT retail kit that does this: Obviously the more additional parts you have the more interesting it could get. I would love to see somebody do ...

So what do you do if you're taking a family trip to Disney World, and you're me? Take your NXT of course! As a physicist, I've always been curious (read: obsessed) with things like the acceleration on roller coasters. So, on a recent trip to Walt Disney World in Florida I took an NXT with a field-ready datalogging program & a Hitechnic 3-axis accelerometer attached. In the picture at left, you can see the NXT with me on Expedition Everest... OK, actually what you see is a picture of me screaming like a little girl with one hand raised, as the other crushes the NXT into the seat beside me. But it's there, trust me. Previously I had datalogged by just grabbing a reading and storing it in a file as quickly as possible. But for a 5 minute ride the resulting file would be large - so large that I could only record one or two rides a day. Instead, the program stores the average value of the three axis data, with the sampling interval selected by the user at start-up. The...