ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Remember Mark Crosbie 's great Queboid ? He has published building instructions now for a shooter version of it (below, there's a  video of the Queboid shooter in action at WRO ). That's certainly one of the robots I am going to rebuild during Christmas holidays.

The NXT 2.0 kit comes with parts to make a ball shooter ("Zamor Sphere Launcher"), but it is not exactly obvious how to build a simple one that is controlled by the NXT, and the shooter on the built-in ShooterBot robot is somewhat strange and hard to transfer to another robot. So I have posted a design for a compact and sturdy Ball Shooter that is easy to attach to another robot: Then I used this shooter as part of this new Baseball Game for NXT 2.0:

Steve Putz, editor of the Robotics Learning web site, has posted some photos from the BrickCon 2009 which took place lately in Seattle (Or., USA). There's also a video showing his walking NXT shooter that made second place in the Walking Robot Competition there (as far as I know, the winner was Gus Jansson's NXT hexapod we reported about one week ago). If anyone has other infos and pictures or videos from that event, please post the links in the comments.

Dear MINDSTORMS fans, Although LEGO did their very best to check and double check the instructions, this somehow slipped through. A small error in one of the printed materials was discovered after the new NXT 2.0 box (8547) was packed and shipped. As you can see in the below picture, form the LEGO MINDSTORMS User Guide (page15) , two of the connections wires for the two drive motors from the starter model “ShooterBot” are misplaced. Although you can easily switch the wires it does not seem as an obvious error for those who are new to MINDSTORMS, resulting in strange behavior on their starter robot. WRONG connection wires in ShooterBot BI The software that also holds all the building and programming instructions have the wires in the correct order. Some of the older MINDSTORMS fans will remember that always the port B and C are used to power skid steer driving or walking, this is because they share the same motor driver IC and therefore they stay better synchronized. CORRECT connecti...

Some time ago, I got hold on a couple of the Technic Competition Cannons and pondered about a usage of them in a model. As I always had plans to try for a LEGO® Gatling Gun , I decided to make an attempt on it: What do you think about it?

As promised, here are the building instructions and program for the NXT Beam Weapon. BTW, the pieces are not limited to one retail kit - there are several more - so you may have to substitute pieces or modify the design. Anyway, for this robot, I decided to try using LDD. It worked quite well. I really like the auto-snap feature, although at times it makes it hard to get a piece where you want it. It would be nice if you had the option to move pieces manually (like MLCAD) in case the auto-snap wasn't working. I also noticed a couple things with the gears. One of our forum members was having trouble with putting a gear on an axle, because the auto-snap feature kept putting the axle through the wrong hole in the gear. I worked around this by putting an axle in a gear separately, and then putting the combination into the correct spot. I also found a way to get gears to mesh - just use the hinge tool to rotate one or both gears in small increments until they fit. I don't know if t...

Remember my Zamor -based NXT shooter called Nashorn that I have published some while ago ? Due to public demand, I've created building instructions for it over the last days that are available (with a lot of other robots) on my personal NXT site now. Next to the shooting mechanism, the interesting thing on that particular robot is its robust base that can rotate in two dimensions in a very stable and precise way, using two turn tables.

During LEGOWORLD, I've built a NXT-driven gun that is based on the Zamor shooter from LEGO(R)'s BIONICLE series. The shooter, named Nashorn (German for Rhin o), is stationary and can be accurately moved in two directions, either autonomously or using a remote control (as I did in the following video). For more pictures, see the robots section of my website.