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I don't even know what to say. This is not mine, but I just saw it: As he says: It's LEGO, and it plays the guitar. I'm impressed. -
So, this has been in my garage for a couple of years and was supposed to be a mega segway, sadly LEGO MINDSTORMS motors are not powerful enough however 24 of them will move someone. First working demo of it, 24 NXT motors, 8 NXT's pure overkill -
Hello, I am woking on plans for a Lego layout of the majority of the Magic Kingdom, in Walt Disney World Florida. I am planning on using the Philips Hue System for lighting so that I can have daytime/nighttime/morning/evening. I also am going to include LifeLites for the lighting of the street and in buildings. A few of the rides will be able to run as well, including the Walt Disney World Railroad which runs around the park. Lastly I am also going to include sounds into different areas of the park to add to the realism. Is there a program where I can make all these systems automated so that by the push of a button or two the entire layout comes to life? -
Hello to everyone. This is my first Topic. I created this page to post optimized versions of the robots from Mindstorms Education and Mindstorms Home. There is a lot of room to improve the robots designed by Lego, especially the ones from the home edition. Basically, most of the improvements can be done by optimizing the software, although I consider that some mechanical advantage can be achieved if we import some of the building technics that fans have developed. Colour Sorter from the Mindstorms Education Core Set. This machine is used to scan objects and the place them in the right place according to their color. When I first built this model I realized that the way it was built was extremely inefficient. The operator has to manually scan every object and then place them in the tray. That was a little disappointing since there is no way to connect this machine to a supply chain. Original model: Then I turned on the machine and things just you kept getting worse. The “sorter” (the part that deal with moving and placing the objects) uses a very obsolete algorithm to know the exact position where a piece should be unload: After unloading a piece, it has to return to the left side so it can star moving to the next unloading position. I ask myself why. Well, because the sorter does not keep track of its movements, so it doesn’t know its location. To correct those problems I rewrote the program aiming for two thing: 1) Making placing and scanning a single movement. 2) Including odometry in the algorithm, so the sorter can know its position by keeping track of its movements. Modified version: I made two changes in the mechanical design: 1) I relocated the sensor so it’s now over the tray 2) I moved the Intelligent Brick 4 studs to the left so I could free the 50cm cable to be use with the now moving sensor. This is the result: Let me know if you want instructions or the ev3 file. Thank You
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Interesting article on LEGO NXT Mindstorms. CNN News.... good publicity for LEGO!! http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/tech/mci-lego-worm/index.html -
AWD MiniKart is my latest creation using three differentials. This is my first attempt at building an All-Wheel-Drive drivetrain, but it was worthwhile the effort. I wouldn't say this is a huge success, but it works well on perfectly smooth terrain. I do have a few ideas for a 4x4 vehicle now ;) It uses two Large Motors to drive the center differential which distribute the power to all four wheels, and the Medium Motor steers the Rack and Pinion setup. I also built a custom base stand for some video purposes; it's not hard to build and has good usages. Any more information you would like will be happily answered. Until NXT time… DamonMM2000 Please click to watch a detailed video on AWD MiniKart! -
Just learned about this tiny Intel Compute Stick Wondering if it might be practical for use with LEGO Wedo, Minstorms NXT and EV3 BTW how are LEGO Train configured. Does it need a computer? -
Sigh, Rebrick.LEGO.com has Mindstorms, Technic and even DUPLO!!!! but Wedo is nowhere to be found. Wedo feels like a neglected poor cousin Anyone knows where there is a home for Wedo? Regarding tags, my son taught me #Mindstorms and #Technic Is that the way to add Topics Tags here?
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I apologize if this has foung the forum before, I searched for "minds-i" and although a billion posts came up none that I could find had anything to do with what I am about to post. ANyways, I found this site and was astounded with the similarity of this company's product with TLG. How are they getting away with this? Has anyone on the forum any experience with these products? Good? Bad? Are they an alternative to Technic and PF? http://mindsirobotics.com/
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Hi all, since I recieved Mindstorms EV3 set 31313 few days ago I've decided to start my first project. I call it CLEV3R CAR and as you can guess it's about car. I've just finished building it and I'm about to start programming it. So let's talk about model first. It looks like Mini Cooper, chassis is inspired by RAC3 TRUCK and I've finished it in just two days. It features two large motors for driving, medium motor for steering, IR sensor instead of radiator and rear bumper with touch sensor. I wanted to build it as small as possible but it became pretty big. I've paid attention to many details so you can easily remove EV3 brick (for example to change batteries) and there is enough space under it so you can use it with original rechargable battery as well. It's also pretty sturdy, I plan to program several modes for it: Automatic - independent driving with avoiding obstacles RC - remotely controlled from IR beacon with driving assistance (for example if you drive it against wall it will stop before it) Search for beacon - independent driving to beacon By the way does anyone have experience with programming searching for beacon? I can imagine how to do it for tank (or other tracked vehicle that can turn on the spot) but car with classic steering is something different... -
Hello all, Firstly, I would like to apologise about the text wall - I got a bit carried away I am writing here on behalf of a FLL (First Lego League-there website address is http://www.firstlegoleague.org/) team I am part of called Fuzzy Logic. For those of you who do not know what FLL is, it is a Lego Robotics competition for school children. There are four parts to winning the competition and they are as follow 1: Robot performance The robot you build has to be a Lego Mindstorms one (it doesn't matter what generation) and it will perform on a mat with various different challenges on. The more challenges you complete, the more points you get. 2: Robot Design This category is about how well built the robot is and what functions it has as well as how innovative it is 3: Core values How well you wok together as a team and with other teams 4: The project The project will be set around a pre decided topic which is decided by First, the people who run the FLL. This year the theme was trash and I will be talking about that later All of these aspects will be individually judged and you will be given an overall score. If you are the highest in your region (for Fuzzy Logic this is the south West) you will go through to the nationals that are to be held in Loughborough this year. We won our regional area along with a team called Tech HEds (I don't know if they post here but if they do, Hello!). So that means that on 21st of February we will be heading up to Loughborough to compete head-to-head with the 39 other best teams in the UK. Whoever wins that will go through to the internationals that are held in America as a representative for the UK. So what is the meaning of the post, I hear you ask and this is it: We would like some help with our project. Our project is called the Net Bag. It is a small, orange bag designed to replace the plastic grocery bags you get in shops. I'll explain it briefly here but there will (should!) be a PowerPoint explaining it more thoroughly attached to this post. EDIT: It turns out I can't upload a PowerPoit but if you do want to see it, PM me you email address and I will email it to you. The Net Bag uses less plastic than the normal one because it is a net and will be made from recycled plastic from the oceans. It is possible to make these, we have tried by shredding up, extruding and then weaving recycled plastic offcuts from our DT department at school. We came up with the idea because we looked at some plastic bag figures and realised how much we are drowning in plastic; we use 5 trillion plastic bags yearly for instance! We also looked at the 5p plastic bag charge and saw how that had created an 80% decrease in plastic bag usage at Tesco! However, the plastic vegetable bags are still free so people are stealing them (we have video evidence to prove this. The Net bag is a good alternative because safe for young children and very strong and long lasting along with other things. That basically sums up the Net bag but you should read the PowerPoint for more information. If you can't open it just tell me. The bit we would like your help with is an online SurveyMonkey we would like you to fill in to gather customer research about the Net Bag. The address is https://www.surveymo...co.uk/r/netbags and it would be really helpful if you could fill it in and tell others about it so we can get more balanced results and good publicity. The survey is self explanatory but if you have any problems please contact me via PM or the comment. Thank you for helping us and for reading that text wall but hopefully it will be worth it. If you have any ideas or suggestions please comment and leave any other feedback. Thanks again, Jim and the rest of Fuzzy Logic -
Hello lego fans I am teaching lego mindstorms to 8 people and have 3 NXT's and wanted to know what simple robots they could build. I am teaching a 4 week course and thinking of going through 1 sensor / week. (US, touch, color. 4th week TBD) I have only 1 hour for them to build and program the robot so it has to be an easy build but with all of the sensors. (4 people /course and 2 hours a day for a total of 8 people.) [EDIT] These kids are aged 7-12. Thanks! William "NXT45" -
I don't write that often in here, but I simply had to share this model. A friend and I have worked on how to introduce kids to programming from a very early age and this is our first project: As said this is our first project in this direction and we are already tinkering with the next project, as this model have quit a few problems. The steering is not precis enough, red balls are often registered as yellow and you need two NXT models to build it! The idea with the next model is that the students should put QR stickers on a paper. We then use a smartphone to register the QR codes. The smartphone then tell the robot how to drive based on the QR codes. The only problem is that we haven't tried to combine smartphones and mindstorms yet. Does any one here have any idea what program to use, how to start working on it or another place we might be able to find some startup help? Part of the model builds on Robin Newmans ball sorter, found at: http://r.newman.ch/lego/ The program can be downloaded at: https://www.mediafire.com/?9h6bb8pggw6ymhm
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Hi I have an EV3 and I was wondering how people control power functions motors and lights from the EV3. I have done some searching and found the following solutions , I was hoping some one might have tried these products and could give me some feed back . If you have any other method of doing this let me know. mindsensors PF Motor controller for NXT or EV3 (PFMate) GlideWheel PF and RCX Motor controller for NXT or EV3 hitechnic NXT IRLink Sensor
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I'm proud to present that the LEGO GBC Pick & Place Robot module from GBC 6 has been digitized and ready for download. Also the NXT program is available on the website. Click here to download the building instructions and the NXT program. Skip to 1:33 to see the Pick and Place Robot working. Click here to support LEGO GBC 6 on LEGO Cuusoo. -
I'm proud to present that the LEGO GBC Pick & Place Robot module from GBC 6 has been digitized and ready for download. Also the NXT program is available on the website. Click here to download the building instructions and the NXT program. Skip to 1:33 to see the Pick and Place Robot working. Click here to support LEGO GBC 6 on LEGO Cuusoo.
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Hi All, I want to share some information regarding the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Software here. The software is available as a 120.-€ education version and as a free "home" version. When I bought the education version, I faced some issues and made some experiences which might be worth to be shared as I couldn't find the information in the www, yet: The 2 software versions are based on the same core software. The education version is enhanced with "data logging" functionality and more than 50 "training" sessions for the programming elements, sensors, etc.. One who is interested in learning to program and a starter (like my 9 yrs. old son) has a real benefit with the education version and I can say that the additional content is worth to spend some money for it. The home version is provided as download in all available languages while the education version is being sold in "market specific" language bundles. I couldn't find any official information about that, but when I bought my software in the Netherlands I got a BENELUX version key which allows me to download the software only in the languages "english", "dutch" and "french". This is somehow strange as "german" is an official language in parts of the BENELUX countries ... Unfortunately, one does not see this "limitation" as the EV3 education software has the same LEGO part number (2000045) in all countries and the available languages can only be seen after the activation / registration of the software. The LEGO EV3 education software is shipped as an activation key which allow to download language specific installation files from the lego education website. After the activation, the LEGO EV3 education software is registered to the user account and cannot be removed any more, which implies that it cannot be resold. Note: Reselling is also excluded in the license agreement. An interesting discussion if this is compatible with the European copyright laws as they generally allow reselling of "used" software. The bricks firmware is also available in a "home" and an "education" version. The education version is enhanced with a "online data logging functionality" which allows to remotely monitor (via Bluetooth/USB/WLAN) the sensor values on a computer. The source code of the firmware home version has been released by LEGO and is available via https://github.com/m...ards/ev3sources. So, that's it for now. If someone has specific questions regarding the software versions, I will be happy to provide an answer, if possible. Cheers, BrickDaddy
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Browsing through some pictures mentioned in [MOC] Dodge Challenger '70 R/T (by Dustyen055), I continued to browse and found this nice creation. More photos can be found on Flickr Chronicler35 -
Hello! Recently i discovered that both the Mindstorms EV3 beacon and the PF IR Remote are interchangeable. Here are some explanations: I was very happy to know that the EV3 Retail Kit comes with a Infrared remote(beacon), which can be used as a remote control for your robots. That's pretty handy if you want to build robots that interact with humans. By accident, i found out that the IR Beacon and PF remote are interchangeable for use with both the MS EV3 and PF systems! I tried it, and they both work with the Mindstorms EV3 IR Sensor and the Power Functions IR Receiver! Seems that the IR signals they produce are the same ( escept for the beacon mode button on the Mindstorms remote). The conclusion is that they can both be used to control EV3 and Power Functions models. Some time ago i read that the RCX can be used to SEND IR signals to the PF IR Receiver. That probably takes more knowledge than i currently have. This lead me to the following question: Can the Mindstorms EV3 Sensor can do the same? Is it able to send IR messages to other devices? For example, is it possible for an EV3 robot, using the Infrared Sensor, to send signals to a Power Functions IR Receiver? In this way you can expand the motor limit (4) with an external battery pack and an IR Receiver. I hope someone has information on that matter! (Solved! the EV3 IR sensor cannot be used to send IR signals to PF receivers and such ...) Thank you in advance! -
MINDSTORMS EV3 OMNIDIRECTIONAL ROBOT INTRODUCTION The reason you are stuck with me as Moderator/Admin is actually caused by Mindstorms EV3. I proposed an Index for Mindstorms and Bonaparte figured I could make one myself. Resulting in me making one, and one thing lead to another. In 2013 TLG released a brand new edition of LEGO Mindstorms. Owning two NXT sets, which I had hardly used to build something cool, I was determined to change that when I bought the EV3 sets. I first bought the 45544 - EV3 Education Core Set set, and shortly after that I added the 31313 - Mindstorms EV3 (Retail) set to my collection. After some initial experiments both unit had been turned on approximately the same number of times as the NXT. This being a terrible waste of potential, I recently decided to start building the robot I have been planning in my mind for a long time. My goal is to build a fairly big humanoid(-ish) robot. Does that sound familiar? Of course it does, since my good mate Simon Burfield (Burf2000) has built a super cool humanoid robot recently. We also know him of the Wheelchair and Segway. And yes, he is a big inspiration to me. What I am aiming at is a Omnidirectional Robot with one or two arms and a Wall-e like head. The height of the robot will be approximately the size of a child, let's say around 120cm. Omnidirectional means allowing movement in all directions (more on that in the next chapter). Since I have no idea where this will end, I have created a WIP topic, in review style. I will add chapters along the way. When I add a new chapter I will post that new chapter and edit the original post. Feel free to comment, hint, tip, suggest, mock and ridicule Before we continue I'd like to give my man Burf and the guys at Rotacaster a big thank you! OMNIDIRECTIONAL WHEELS Here's the wikipedia description for Omni wheels: Omni wheels or poly wheels, similar to Mecanum wheels, are wheels with small discs around the circumference which are perpendicular to the turning direction. The effect is that the wheel can be driven with full force, but will also slide laterally with great ease. These wheels are often employed in holonomic drive systems. A platform employing three omni wheels in a triangular configuration is generally called Kiwi Drive. The Killough platform is similar; so named after Stephen Killough's work with omnidirectional platforms at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Killough's 1994 design used pairs of wheels mounted in cages at right angles to each other and thereby achieved holonomic movement without using true omni wheels.[1] They are often used in small autonomous robots in intelligent robots research in the academia. In projects such as VEX Robotics, Robocup and FIRST Robotics, many robots use these wheels to have the ability to move in all directions. Omni wheels are also sometimes employed as powered casters for differential drive robots to make turning faster. However, this design is not commonly used as it leads to fishtailing. LINKS Some interesting links: Omniwheels Mecanum wheels Ball transfer unit Holonomic Festo After 15 seconds you can see the Kiwi Drive in action: Control using gamepad ROTACASTER Here's the complete lineup for Rotacaster wheels with LEGO hubs. From left to right: 125mm 48mm 35mm As you can imagine the 125mm version are for heavy duty applications. Since the robot will probably by quite heavy, I figured the bigger the better. There's also a 125mm version with 3 wheels instead of 2. However, this will probably suffice for my robot. The diameter of the 125mm is slightly larger than a 15L liftarm and the width is slightly less than 6L. CONCEPT Here's a simple concept sketch. And an artist impression of how the robot should look like. The end result will probably look nothing like this one, but it's nice to have an idea. PROTOTYPE I have started building the prototype. The idea was to buil in a modular fashion, but this early concept failed miserably. VERSION 2 The triangular shape poses quite a few challenges. Not that I hate a challenge, but I am contemplating on making a four wheeled version. The idea is to create 4 standalone wheel units, which can be attached to a center hub, possibly with shock absorbers. The red liftarms underneath need to be removed, because they will prevent the wheels to be mounted. This is just a simple LDD setup I drew, since we discussed Bob's problem with turntables. That made me rethink my setup. Some turntables and dog bones for the new setup. When using the modular setup for the wheels, I could easily switch between different setups, three or four wheels. My progress is what you see in the pictures. Now let's have fun discussing and mocking. Alasdair mocking in ...3....2....
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Hi all! About an year ago, while tinkering with lasers and fog, I had this crazy idea of building a laser harp. It finally reached a level where one can actually play it, so I'm showing it here: It's not a great LEGO MOC - just a framework to hold 7 EV3 color sensors and 7 Power Function Lights (to be replaced with 7 red 1 mW lasers in the future). I use 2 Mindsensors multiplexers to connect 6 of the color sensors to 2 of the EV3 inputs. The 7h sensor is connected directly to a third input. The fourth input is reserved for an ultrasonic sensor, I hope to read hands distance to control notes amplitude. The 7 PF Lights are connected to one output port so I can control brightness. A second output port will be used to control a fog machine. I'm running ev3dev (Debian linux for the EV3). It has some support for music but not [yet] for MIDI. I decided to use MIDI because it allows polyphonic sounds and also choosing different instruments so I'm sending the notes to my linux laptop to be played by a software MIDI synthesizer there. Software is very basic, just two python scripts (one at the EV3, the other at my laptop). For those who might be interested, I'm publishing some more details (and the code) at my blog. -
Hello all! It has been a while since I have posted here but I have got a new toy! It is on loan to me for the summer and I plan to use it well. This thread will be where I post all my creations and hopefully the programs. I have a few programs ready and waiting to be filmed and a lot more ideas. None of them have been filmed yet, but here is a trailer to wet your appetite!: As usual, please leave any constructive feedback and keep popping back because I will (probably should!) be updating this thread fairly often. Technic Jim
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Sioux.NET on Track is a group of enthusiastic colleagues who come together after working hours to get experience with Microsoft.NET. To make learning fun, we develop an application in C# for making a full automated Lego train, using Lego Mindstorms and Lego Power functions. The layout is always shown at Lego World in the Netherlands. Our plans for 2016 have been published at our blog: siouxnetontrack.wordpress.com as well as an article about the new updated crane positioning. You can also view a video at our Youtube channel about the power chain systems: Enjoy, Hans -
I built a new ride on vehicle for Brick 2015 at London Excel. It was super popular and I am so tired now (3 day event, 20,000 + people) Uses 10 NTX's 22 motors, rotacaster 125mm wheels! Made in 5 evenings powered by RedBull
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Good day everybody and let's continue with the boat mania!!! Today I would like to post my experimental NXT project- The Supra Yacht. It uses two Nxt motors for propulsion , but I disn't tested the propulsion system yet. It is built on top of two 1l plastic water bottles , and all electronics are on top.Because every NXT component is on the rear of the boat I built a long mast on the front for maintain the balance. The mast is connected to one Nxt motor. Here's the video: