ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Easter is at hand, and in time MCP Mike Brandl from Austria has adapted his 2008's christmas bauble painter to use it for painting easter eggs: At the bottom of the assiocated web page , you can find a LDraw file that can be used as building instructions as well as the archived NXT-G program (including the required MyBlocks and a small ReadMe for usage). Go for it and show us your best easter eggs you have created with it!

An amazing build with a unique method of changing direction. The action begins 90 seconds into the video.

Although I've been really busy with FTC ever since the competition got underway, I've still found some time here and there to work on NXT projects. One concept I've always been interested in is the idea of making a certain number of motors able to drive a larger number of mechanisms, one at a time. So I put together a simple transmission design, in which two motors can drive each of four axles, one at a time. The first motor turns a gear which can drive gears on each of four axles. The second motor drives a rack-and-pinion system to move the first motor to across the four axles. The user can press the left and right arrow keys to switch from driving one axle to the next. Here you can see the four axles with black gears on them, and the grey gear on the motor which drives them. Here you can see the rack-and-pinion mechanism for moving the first motor across the four axles. You can see a video of the robot in action below: Although it would probably make a robot more complica...

The on-board camera makes for a fun video. More details here .

Here's a final video of an animal from the NXT Zoo Book . It's based on the pygmy elephant of Borneo.

Well, it didn't take my younger brother long to use a mini NXT brick to create a (very) mini NXT robot... Now if only there was some way to make that thing work... :) -Jonathan

Sergio Reano has a new update for his 3D Rendering Software . I haven't used the software; however, it claims to provide support for .dat files, .ldr files and .mpd files, including non-certified parts files. Please give us your feedback on the software, if you've used it.

Shown here is the stegosaurus. The link to three chapter excerpts is here . There are numerous parts substitutions listed throughout the book. (For example, the book shows how the "scales" of the stegosaurus can be made in different ways). There are also parts packs that make building easier. (The education resource set is a helpful adjunct for seven of the nine models). More details regarding parts will be in a forthcoming post.

This LEGO NXT Robot takes balls from the mixer drum and by using a series of cunning devices puts them back into the mixer. It uses a Light sensor to count the balls as they go into the skip. When five balls have been counted, sometimes more if the lighting conditions change, the skip is rotated and the balls are dumped onto the conveyor belt. This takes them to the lift which takes them up to a drop off area. The balls then fall back into the drum. The conveyor belt is driven with a PF motor controlled by an IR Link. The lift starts as a timed event triggered by the rotating skip. So fresh batteries are a must for the conveyor belt. Both the rotating skip and lift use the motors rotation sensor to set their positions. The drop off area at the top of the lift is controlled mechanically.

Gives new meaning to the term, "dot matrix".

Hi, when looking at some of the pictures from LEGO(R)'s production line, some people in the NXT STEP forum pointed out that the Billund designers obviously use Autodesk Maya as a 3D design tool for LEGO(R) models. The discussion ensuing there revealed that that product is known as something rather professional but experience with it amongst the forum members is quite limited. How about you? Can somebody from the community provide information here (best in the according forum topic thread , of course)?