ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

I wanted to link to a short YT video here, a version of Claude Shannon's Ultimate Machine . This is really an amazing mechanism here, and demonstrates in a small package some amazing mechanical techniques - techniques actually very commonly seen in a lot of "real" robots and industrial mechanisms, and rendered beautifully here in LEGO (the subject is also a rather famous robot of a sort). Note that this has no NXT in it. In fact, it doesn't even have a single PF motor in it. There's no wires, no programming, and the closest it gets to a MINSTORMS solution is that it uses gears: So why the heck am I posting about it here, in a blog dedicated to the NXT? One of the things that's easy to overlook when working with something like the NXT is that when you have your hands around a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. The NXT is a powerful microcomputer, that can read multiple sensors and run lots of motors, and so there's a tendency to think that's...

If your Light Sensor isn’t working properly, try recalibrating it, or setting the calibration back to the defaults. I recently mis-calibrated my light sensor, and spent about 10 minutes trying to figure out why it wasn’t working. It only registered a range of about 10. So everything was coming out wrong on the readings. I figured it out finally. I had messed up the calibration. Once I reset the light sensor calibration, everything started working as expected again.

I was recently playing with the T-56 Robotic Arm (from the Mindstorms Kit). My son (he's 5) built about 65% of the robot. We created the default program… it grabs a ball, and if it is red, it turns and drops it on the ground. If it is blue, it puts the ball back on the stand. My son wanted to try some other colors with it. So we started with the Red and Blue ball, and added a Green ball, a Yellow ball and an Orange ball. My son had an old play set from when he was 2. It had the three colored balls, and they are the same size as the two that come with the NXT system. On to the Adventure! TIP : Check your light source first, since different amounts of light will give you a different reading. If possible, try and use colors that are farther apart on the color spectrum. Close colors often have a close light value, and even that can vary slightly if your object is moving or the reading is not taken in the same light every time. We used the colored balls and came up w...