ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Recently I've begun moving all of my Mindstorms creations made in the past years to a new home - http://robotsquare.com/ I'm moving my old site to be able to better organize and archive my Mindstorms work. I'm rewriting some of my work as tutorials, to make it easier for you to remake some of the projects you'll find on the site. Not all of the content has been moved yet, but you can have a look if you like. I'll still be blogging here, of course, don't worry -- My old site just needed an upgrade.

Xander wrote: " Hi and welcome to the new site . No, I’ve not been hijacked, kidnapped or otherwise subverted. This is the new home for “I’d Rather Be Building Robots”. Since that whole sentence would make for a really terrible domain name, I did some brain storming for a new name and I came up empty. Good thing my dad was in the advertising business for 25 years in a past life and he came up with “ botbench.com ”. " He will keep us informing about the new and exciting stuff as he was before More interesting will be his all new Sensor Compendium . looking forward as the Go-To source for everything you wanted to know about sensors for the Mindstorms NXT platform and more . The old site will be set up to redirect to this one, so you should update your bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc. Some older posts may look a little wonky with the new theme but you’ll just have to forgive Xander for not going back over about 250 articles to check if they were OK.

Our Japanese readers may be interested in reading the blog called " LEGO Days ". The website seems to be an interesting ongoing report of experiences from a father and son who are new to the NXT. There are numerous of photographs as well.

There are many blogs out in the world today. Many are devoted to LEGO topics. Some are devoted to Robotics. But not many are devoted to both LEGO and Robotics. The Brothers Brick is one of the LEGO Blogs out there. It isn't really Robotics focused, or even Technic focused. It's more of a "Check out this cool creation". They have a good group of authors, and a large readership. The Brothers Brick recently posted their 10 Other LEGO Blogs you should be reading . And guess who is on the list! That's right. The NXT Step! One of the other blogs they mentioned looks pretty good too. It's called TechnicBRICKS . They cover a lot of Technic creations, which often go hand-in-hand with the NXT Robotics creations too. And one last find. The Brothers Brick recently featured a Tripod Turret that is fully automated, and appears to be powered by some PF devices. You can read their writeup here. The Brothers Brick - Auto-Controlled Tripod Turret .

Back on Feb 26, we invited our readers to start submitting website/forum/blog URLs to our online resource collection - this is just a "bump" of that message to keep it visible. You can read the original post here or jump straight to the forum to share a site (or more). Be sure to read the instructions, and THANK YOU for helping us build this resource collection.

Calling all NXT Fans... Okay, the contributors here at The NXT Step need your help. The number of blogs, websites, forums, and more dedicated to the NXT are growing and growing and we're just not able to keep up with everything new that's appearing out there. We've decided to create an HTML webpage to organize all the NXT resources out there. (We may also make this a downloadable document as well.) How can you help? Easy. Go to our Forum and look under the General Category (the first section of our forum). Inside there you will see a new category called "NXT Resource Collection". Open the Collection thread and help us build the new webpage. The rules are simple - 1. Provide us with the URL of an NXT resource that you'd like to add to the collection. Please do not provide URLs that already exist on our blog's homepage; we're already aware of them :) 2. Provide us with a short (3 sentences or less) description of the site if you can. 3. To help ...

Today, I ran across four (German-speaking) blogs in the web where FIRST LEGO League teams regularly blog on their experiences and progress in respect to the upcoming FLL " Power Puzzle " competition. Do you know of other FLL-related blogs out there? Addendum: There has been a similar posting on THE NXT STEP in May (with some links in comments), but that was for the "Nano Quest" then. There might be additional ones now (for instance, in Germany the attendance marked a new record on the number of participating teams for the actual FLL competition - no less than 101 up to 460!).