A design issue that I mention several times in the projects on www.nxtprograms.com is that of weight balance. To get a mobile robot to perform well, you need to get a good percentage of the total robot weight over the driven parts (powered wheels, legs, whatever), and keep weight over other parts that are just rolling or dragging to a minumum. Well, this Dog Sled Team project appears to set the record for the worst weight balance of any of my projects so far, with only about 10% of the total weight over the front legs of the dogs, which are trying to do all the work to drag the heavy sled. So how does it work? How do real dogs do it? Hmm, maybe there's a trick to it...
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...