ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

The challenge was to remake Wall-E3 (the one that went to Atlanta for the FIRST World Championship earlier this year) but to use only Mindstorms this time! No Power function or 3rd party components!!  humm,   Well we all know the NXT Servo motors are 'huge' and only 3 can be plugged  per NXT... Conclusion?  zWall-E4! Tech. Spec.: 3 NXT bricks 8 NXT Servo Motors 2 Color Sensors (for the eyes) 1 Ultrasonic Sensor 4 Touch Sensors & Bluetooth was used to link all 3 NXT's via a NXT-G 2.0 program. OK so he doesn't transform (yet), but I'm still quite happy with the result. There is always room for improvement though :) I look forward to hear your comments. Hope you enjoy this short video and for those lucky to be there, make sure you come see us at the MCP booth at LEGO WORLD 2010 next week. I: /. 7.

About a year ago, I blogged about datalogging acceleration profiles of several rides at Walt Disney World, using the HiTechnic accelerometer and the NXT. Well the story doesn't end there. I mentioned this information on a Disney fan site, where not only were people interested in the results, but asked for more - particularly a ride called Rockin' Rollercoaster, which uses a linear motor to shoot the train forward at high acceleration straight into a loop. The problem was this coaster exceeds the 2.5 G limit of the Hitechnic accelerometer, so I decided to try again, using the "Version 3" accelerometer from Mindsensors , that can reportedly measure up to 10 G's. Mindsensors very graciously providing me with a unit to test, and I thought this would be the ideal way to do it... subjecting the hardware (& myself) to high-G rides, and review a sensor in the process. The Mindsensors newest accelerometer was mentioned here back in August: it has a user-selectable ...

So what do you do if you're taking a family trip to Disney World, and you're me? Take your NXT of course! As a physicist, I've always been curious (read: obsessed) with things like the acceleration on roller coasters. So, on a recent trip to Walt Disney World in Florida I took an NXT with a field-ready datalogging program & a Hitechnic 3-axis accelerometer attached. In the picture at left, you can see the NXT with me on Expedition Everest... OK, actually what you see is a picture of me screaming like a little girl with one hand raised, as the other crushes the NXT into the seat beside me. But it's there, trust me. Previously I had datalogged by just grabbing a reading and storing it in a file as quickly as possible. But for a 5 minute ride the resulting file would be large - so large that I could only record one or two rides a day. Instead, the program stores the average value of the three axis data, with the sampling interval selected by the user at start-up. The...