ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Merry Christmas everybody!

Christmas is approaching, so I decided to come up with a NXT Christmas robot this year, the NXTolaus : The NXTolaus can be built with a single LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT 2.0 set. When roaming around with a closed bag full of presents, it will detect you with its Ultrasonic sensor. In that case, it will stop, speak some Christmas greetings and open its bag. Once you have taken out the presents, the NXTolaus will notice that using a hidden touch sensor at the bottom of the bag; it then closes the bag and "walks" away. See details and find building and programming instructions in the robots section of my NXT web site .

At the World Robot Olympiad I met a team from St. Petersburg in Russia. They had created a very nice NXT robot called " Robot Decorator " that is able to paint Christmas baubles (and balloons):

There's a nice video on YouTube of the MINDSTORMS Blues band playing a Christmas song, led by an inspired OrganFairy : :)

This Santa and Rudolph project was from last year, but I added a video recently. Merry Christmas everyone!

I hope you all had a fantastic Christmas yesterday and you found lots of MINDSTORMS and LEGO stuff under the Christmas tree. We had a fabulous Christmas day yesterday - We started the day with the kids opening their presents... and watching the kids playing with the roller skates they got for Christmas and other cool toys while we stuffed ourselves with food and wine. The highlight of the day was giving all the kids their own NXT for Christmas: I have had enough of having a single MINDSTORMS NXT in the house shared between four people - and decided it would increase the peace and harmony in the house if every child had their own NXT. So for Xmas each of our children got one NXT, four NXT sensors each, and a selection of motors - including TECHNIC & PF XL motors, PF standard motors, remotes and power supplies. To top it all, we decided to have a building competition , where everyone get an hour to dream up and build a machine (with or without the NXT) and fight each other. To make i...