ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

NXT1engineer made a cool new project for the winter period. February first it will be 70 years ago that Piet Mondriaan died, but we still enjoy his art as NXT1engineer writes: " After the amazing beer machine project from winter 2011/2012 , we have added a new project for this winter. Our aim was to build a machine that would make it fun and easy for every child to create art. The outcome is phenomenal. An ordinary ceramic tile is easily transformed into a real art piece. The video is (of my 9 year old son) based on the works by the famous Dutch artist, Piet Mondriaan . He is well known for his colored squares in primary colors." It has been said that the basic bright LEGO colors are actually based on Piet Mondriaan's paintings.

The MinuteBot Baseplate (A LEGO TECHNIC compatible construction plate) is available now for $19.99 / EUR 16.00 / GBP 12.60. You can find more information here . (The NXT STEP is not affiliated with MinuteBot. This is not an official LEGO product.)

Sartphones are nice, but spending all your time with tapping a screen to break the egg, seems to call for a MINDSTORMS robot. The hard part was sensing the LEGO fingers, smart phones have capacitive screens, those do not detect plastic fingers, so to do this a special foil was used. (the anti static bags that normally contain printed circuits) Read more on how touchscreens work The complete robot was build on the special Minutebot baseplate The maximum speed in controlling the smart phone was 7.5 times per second. again a nice project form NXT1engineer.

NXT1Engineer made a nice M&M sorter using the special minutebot base plates made possible with the Kickstarter project . It shows that much more can be done with these plates. Enjoy, the red!

Update: The project has been funded! :) We'll keep you updated when one of us receives the base plates. Have you checked out the MinuteBot Base project that Damien blogged about earlier ? The Kickstarter funding project still needs a few more backers to make it become reality. Keep in mind that this is not 'donating'. If you pledge, you're buying a product at a discount price. The product is a Technic Base Plate, 21x30. There's only 4 days left to pledge. If you'd like to have one of these plates for your robots, get one now you still can! To pledge, go here . Here's a suggestion by Jetro on how to use the baseplate. What will you make?

One of the challenges we robot builders have, is creating a nice stable base for our creations.  I've used the large Exo wheels in the past, but have always wondered why LEGO have never made a baseplate made entirely with the Technic holes. Rather than waiting for LEGO to come up with something, Lasse Mogensen and Soren Jensen decided to make it themselves.  It's called the MinuteBot Base and they've jumped on Kickstarter to see if they can raise the funds to put it into production. So what is it exactly?  It a LEGO baseplate, the height of a normal Technic beam with 21 x 30 holes. It will make creating bases for all types of robots quick, and more importantly, not use up all your other vital LEGO technic beams! Laurens Printer on 2 minutebot bases At the time of this blog post, they had raised nearly $6,000 of their $11,000 target.  Basically that means they need another $5000 to meet their target and start production.  What happens if they d...