jsp56

Hi, We are returning to this forum after a long time away and I wondered if I could ask a quick question? My son is 13 now and is keen on building really creative mindstorms robots. I wondered if there is a particular place on this forum that we should go to to share pictures of our robots and to see other people's? I have looked at the pi wars competitions and groups but that seems very advanced. We are not looking for competition, but just fun and bit of company while we work on great new designs. Thanks!

Brilliant, thanks for that :-)

Hi, I wondered if there might be some easy way to make lego instructions for a model that we have built ourselves? Thanks!

Will do, :-) Thanks!

Thanks, that's great to know that it's okay to link youtube videos here. My son is really pleased that you like robot. :-)

Hi, My 9 year old son has just built this robot and would like to show some photos to like-minded folks here so others can enjoy it too. The robot is his first go at a battlebot and it is called Heads Up. It has two spinning hammers at the sides, and can go forwards and backwards and can steer. It has a safety card to prevent anybody from getting "cogged" unexpectedly. The card has to be inserted for the robot to work. The card has a yellow section and when the colour sensor detects the yellow colour, the robot turns on. It also has a flipper arm at the back for flipping over the opponents in the competition. My son designed and built the robot, and wrote the program, but had help from Dad with debugging. Here are some photos below. Is there any way to link to videos on the Bricksafe website? We have two videos of the robot working. Thanks! This is the safety card mechanism: This is the card coming out. This is the card right out. Here are two videos of the robot working:

That's nifty! Testing now: Brilliant! This system is great. :-) Thanks! My son is watching videos of the 42082 crame and quoting all the spec to me. He thinks it's extremely cool.

Thanks, I'll find out about Bricksafe. The program hasn't been written yet so we're not quite sure how the gyro sensor does its job. The idea though is that when the gyro sensor changes its orientation then the control block will know that someone has turned the steering wheel and then the car will turn. I think the plan for making the car steerable is to make the wheels work as though they were tank tracks. This is what my son says. Thanks for asking. :-) Does this look like the right kind of thing? https://bricksafe.com/pages/jsp56/ev3rdrive Thanks!

Thanks :-) Here are the photos: https://taptaptaphitit.blogspot.com/2019/10/ev3rdrive.html

Hi, I wondered if I could show you some photos of my 9 year old son's new model? He's keen to share it with fellow-enthusiasts. It is an electric car. Here is the first photo. It has an opening roof for access to the control block. Oh dear. I have run out of space in my image budget. How do I add more without maxing out the kb range? I cut the images down from 58cm wide to 5cm wide with 3 quality jpg. Thanks! The exciting bits are that it has a turning key to start the car, and a gyro sensor attached to the streering wheel so that the car can sense when the steerign wheel is being turned.

Hi, Thank you very much for the warm welcome. That's great that you are happy for us to have a go. I see what you mean about that crane set, and getting a lot of parts. We don't have much technical lego (post 1990) but the one set that we do have is 42009 which really gave us a lot of parts. Having one more like that and buying sensors as we need them makes a lot of sense. Thank you for pointing out those wheels. They look great. I'll show them to my son. He's working on a complicated model of an elbow at the moment so hopefully we'll have some photos to post soon. Thanks again for your kind welcome. Jennifer

Hi, I wondered if I could ask for some advice on how my 9 year old son could find people to chat to about his mindstorms models online? I think that what he would like to do is be on a facebook-style forum where he could show pictures of his models and discuss with other keen builders, and exchange tips. I wondered if that is something he could do here if I read along with him and check his posts? He has the retail base set and the education expansion set, and lots of normal lego bricks, and I think he would like to build the sort of models that could be entered in a robot wars type of competition. We have pi wars competitions nearby but no competitions for mindstorms builders, so online is the nearest good option. I also wondered if you might know what would be useful for him as a Christmas present to enlarge his options for building? I'm not sure whether it is more useful to have extra sensors or extra technic bricks. We saw an amazing model at an exhibition recently that could solve a rubicks cube really quickly but it seemed to have 8 control blocks, which is really a lot of lego to save up for. I'm a research scientist/computer programmer and Dad is a kernel hacker, so we're reasonably good at helping him along, but would like to give him his independence a bit. Thanks!