Built On The Rock at World Fest

Alright, I know this is really late - it's taken a while to get back to normal after all the excitement of FLL. Anyway, Built On The Rock had a great time at the World Festival this year! Since this was our first time being there, it was a really exciting experience. As Jim posted about earlier, we won 1st Place Robot Performance and 1st Place Innovative Robot.

As some of you may have seen already, I put up a NXTLog of our robot, which you can see here. Now that the competition's over, you can also see a video of our robot in action on our website, here. The video was taken before our state competition in December. Since then, we made improvements to all the missions, so we'll also be putting up a video of one of our competition rounds at the WF on our Press and Videos section soon.

Below are various pictures of the action at the World Festival:

Dean Kamen speaking at the opening ceremonies... we had front row seats!

Our team pit. The police uniform and lab coat are made from nanofabric - grape juice, water, and other highly-stainable substances simply bead up and roll right off this amazing material! This was the subject of our research project for the competition.

Setting up for one of our rounds, and one of our technical judges posing for the picture. :-)

An interesting picture one of the team parents got right after our robot achieved a third perfect score. :P

Posing with the Mindstorm Troopers after both of our teams got perfect scores in all three rounds... the four fingers we're holding up represents our scores of 400.

And as always, you can find out more about the team at: http://www.TeamBuiltOnTheRock.org

-Jonathan

Celebrating MINDSTORMS with a Remix - Part 3

The ROBOTMAK3RS continued their celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS through these Fall and Winter remix projects. Each ROBOTMAK3R was tasked with selecting one LEGO set of their choice and combining it with a MINDSTORMS set. Below are the five amazing models they came up with. Braill3 by Jerry Nicholls Braill3 is an EV3-based LEGO Braille bricks reader. This robot uses its fingertip, made from three touch switches, to read messages written using the LEGO Braille bricks and will speak out what it detected. If it sees a simple maths problem it will attempt to solve it and give the answer as well. To learn more about the process of creating this machine, read Jerry's blog . Braill3 can be viewed here . Set Review: The Braille Bricks set is well thought out. The ratios of the letters is suitable for general use and the addition of some punctuation and arithmetic operators is excellent. There is a card showing what bricks there are and their quantities, but no form of sort...

Celebrating MINDSTORMS with a Remix - Part 2

The ROBOTMAK3RS continued their celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS through these summer and fall remix projects. Each ROBOTMAK3R was tasked with selecting one LEGO set of their choice and combining it with a MINDSTORMS set. Below are the five amazing models they came up with. Remote controlled material handle r by Jozua van Ravenhorst (aka Mr Jo) This remix combines the LEGO Technic Material Handler (42144) with MINDSTORMS EV3 (31313) It uses the power of pneumatic cylinders to move objects around. By using a bluetooth remote control, very precise movements can be made with this model. Touch sensors in the base chassis prevent the turret twisting the cables that go through the turntable to much. The program has several protections to prevent over pressurizing the system for each of the 3 individual pumps and valves that control the 2 booms and claws. The real version of this machine is mostly used in waste material sites to bring the material to machines that sort and...

Celebrating 25 Years of MINDSTORMS

In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of MINDSTORMS, we take a trip through history. Please also visit ROBOTMAK3RS Community every week as we highlight different projects all through 2023 in celebration of the anniversary. Some of the early history is based on the content shared by Coder Shah in our MINDSTORMS EV3 Community Group . Some of the text and links may have been edited from his original posts for consistency and clarity. 1984 - Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen watched a TV program called "Talking Turtle," where MIT professor Seymour Papert demonstrated how children could control robot "turtles" using LOGO, a programming language he developed. 1988 - The collaboration between MIT and LEGO resulted in LEGO TC Logo in 1988, which allowed students to control LEGO models using computer commands. The video shows Papert demonstrating TC Logo. 1990 - LEGO TC Logo was hampered since the robots you built had to be tethered to a personal computer. LEGO and MIT...

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