ROBOTMAK3RS Blog

Laurens Valk made an extra bonus model that Sort LEGO bricks by color and size, for those who have the book. By finding the right program name in the book, you can enter a special section of the acompaning website . The program and building instructions are in the same high quality as the book and in full color.

Last month Rebrick had a contest amongst MCP's. It was simple -- had to be an EV3 robot, could not be one of the bonus models,  public would votes during month of September,  then most likes would wins -- This was not an easy task but 9 prepared MCP's  have managed to treat us with great EV3 creations! With 39 votes at the end of the competition, our winner is LEGO: EV3ized Dolphin Cruiser by –Vuurzoon, Anika Congratulation Anika - your integrations of Friends and Mindstorms is once again fabulous. And congrats also to our runner ups Mike - this was a super video of your winning design Sticker into Flyer bot! Philo - thank you for a great additional bonus model complete with BI's (right?) Check out all the entries below, go click Like on your favorites, who knows,  one days the votes might shift ;)  Don't miss this and many more stories by SmooreSara on the ReBrick blog http://rebrick.lego.com/en-US/BottomMenu/Blog/10042013-dont-walk-to-mordor...

Not really MINDSTORMS but again an impressive model by our GBC master builder akiyuky. The model uses a similar mechanism to lift the beams as was created in the earlier axle sorter.

French LEGO® MINDSTORMS master builder Philo has published a brick sorter that can be built with a single EV3-set: He states that he will publish building instructions and programs soon after the official release of LEGO® MINDSTORMS EV3 in autumn. 

NXT1Engineer made a nice M&M sorter using the special minutebot base plates made possible with the Kickstarter project . It shows that much more can be done with these plates. Enjoy, the red!

Nice LEGO sorter and interview with its creator - NeXT-Generation http://www.robotc.net/blog/2012/04/30/bucket-o-bricks-brick-sorter/ I love: The conveyor that organises the pieces (45 seconds in) The pneumatic feeder that passes 1 block at a time (1:15) The pneumatic / motor claw that takes the brick to the correct colour bin (1:45) Heck, I love the whole thing! :) The whole video is long at 24 minutes, but mesmerising in a weird sort of way. After around 2 minutes, he dives down in to the detail of how it all works.

MCP Xander Soldaat, editor of the robot blog BotBench and author of many a driver for the C-based NXT programming language RobotC , has implemented some popular sorting algorithms in RobotC and made a nice video on visualizing their sequence on the NXT's LCD: A nice show case for anyone interested in informatics.

From the guys who brought you the C5 NXT Blimp , have a look at this awesome industrial color and size sorting plant commissioned by Dynaway . T his model is used to demonstrate their manufacturing execution system. It sorts 2x4 and 1x2 bricks in size and color. The bricks get sorted directly into pallets in a high bay storage system. When a new color is detected, an empty pallet in the high bay storage is assigned to the color. When a pallet is full, a robot retrieves it, and returns a new empty pallet.  There are 7 NXT’s in the plant, and they all communicate with each other and a PC application over Bluetooth. The software written in leJOS, with is a java language for MINDSTORMS®. Full details can be found on the  BrickIt    team's website

Most LEGO sorters rely on things like colour and possibly raw size to differentiate. This one by Akiyuki uses a webcam combined with a set of digital scales to do some fantastic vision recognition. It's a little bit slow, but I love the two-stage conveyor belt which does an excellent job of isolating different LEGO pieces. The nice thing about this particular setup, it that with just a change in software, you could sort all manner of objects, LEGO, candy, small toys, nuts/bolts etc. -- Damien Kee www.damienkee.com

NXT user Robin Newman has started a cool new web site where he fully documents three different ball sorting robots he designed for NXT 2.0 (and I hear another one is on the way). Included on the site are full building instructions with photos, programs, videos, and a nice description of his design process and experiences working on these. Nice work Robin! Check it out.

Ronald mcRae, creator of some impressive models, build this supersized MINDSTORMS 1.0 ball sorter. Check out some if his other models too. Martyn

This NXT Peg Sorter will sort long black NXT pegs from long gray pegs, into two separate bins. A conveyor feeds pegs down in a chute, then the light sensor is used to see the color of the peg as it is sliding down the chute, then a hitting arm hits the black pegs to the side while allowing gray pegs to fall straight down into the other side. Here is a video of the machine in action: There are simpler and more reliable ways to sort pegs, but with this project I wanted to do something similar to the way some modern high speed mechanical sorters work in factories. In some of these machines, the items are thrown quickly past a gap in the conveyor belt, where an optical sensor looks for rejects, and then air jets are used to knock the rejected items down through the gap into a reject bin, while the good items continue past the gap to the other side. The challenges are to quickly detect a reject and then to get the right timing between seeing the reject and pushing it out of the fast movin...