ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Now that the Education EV3 site is on-line for some time, it was retails turn to show their models and content. As of September 1st, the box 31313 is officially on sale in most mayor retail shops. I'm sure that many of our readers already found the new LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 retail website . But did you also know that the older NXT (2.0) site is still on-line? If not then this is your time to download the last FIRMWARE, BONUS MODELS and NXT-G, before the site goes of-line. Don't wait too long.....

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.

The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 Discovery Book now has a companion website with additional information about the book, downloadable programs, hints & solutions to solve the "Discoveries" as well as updates. You can go to the website using this link .

So I got an Apple iPad recently, and I have seen the future... This a cool device, and it's good at many things. One thing that it is exceptionally good at is viewing LEGO building instructions, because you can have it with you right on the floor with your LEGOs, and it's interactive, connected, color, etc. It beats a laptop or a stack of books easily at this task. So I made a little video demo of using it in various ways for this (viewing web content directly, PDFs, eBooks, etc). This may be the future of education... Check it out.

I have been building MINDSTORMS robots for about five years now, and in this time I've created quite a few different robots. I have recently created a new website to share information about these designs. Only some of the 35+ designs on this website have building instructions, but the construction and design tricks may still be helpful to you. The link is here .

Ok, so I recently remembered I had created an account over at Bravenet a long time ago. Since I had recently entered in the Pellet Contest Jonathan posted about earlier, I thought I should publish some of the details about my entry, the Pellet Machine. Hence, I obligated myself to start up a website: www.legorichard.bravehost.com/homepage.html It's not much right now, but it has the details of my entry on it. If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, whatever, be sure to comment here or email me at lego_richard@yahoo.com . Again, happy 4th! Richard

I stumbled upon BrickEngineer this evening. I especially liked the mechanism for a smooth LEGO clutch. There's some great animation that shows the clutch in action. It would make a great stand-alone mechanism, or it could be incorporated into a robot. Be sure to check out all three Meta Parts Pages. There's even something for geometry geeks.

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.