New Projects

I wonder why i even start new projects when some of the older ones havnt even really gotten that much feet off the ground. 

anyway, as a compliment to the 4 legged monstrosity i've been working on.  (Which i havent blogged about) i'm working on a biped with similar leg design but this time, instead of worm gearing the knee joints, i'm using the new fangled linear actuators at the rear of the leg.  

I havent seen anyone do it yet, and by the looks of my initial sketches and moc ups it looks to be huge.   I've always wanted to have as much of the controls within the body as possible and with the linear actuators its much easier to do so.  Could i be ambitious enough to make it with the Power Functions? now only if there was a way to get the ankle controls all the way back up to the main body.  So we'll see how it works. 

Recap and the coming season

The summer was full of NXT goodness, all sorts of ideas we had this time 

from wearable armor to booby traps, remote controls and a huge F'n Y made out of LEGO. 

The ideas were pretty grand, with just 3 real days to build the project i had to come up with new and exciting stuff, my favorite was the remote controls though.   i had 20 robots running in 10 pairs and only one died because of the battery.  The controller itself was pretty dang durable if i say so myself . 

A nice looking dual forward/back stick made out of the retail kit and the resource kit and program to boot.  This badboy is on its way to being published and its been tried and true. 

It was a great event to get the whole camp involved as well, we were all excited about it.  In the end i modified it so that i had the touch sensors by the thumbs, they felt a little more like fighter jets then. 

The robots themselves were modified versions of the retail tribot with a simplified claw attachment. As it was just strong enough to hold the ball  it made it hard to do anything with it.  It would work really well autonomosly, but not with the controller.  It was nice to see.

This coming season i'm looking to use the task bot built in the LEGO Engineering curriculum, i hope it turns out well, looks like you can do a lot of stuff with it but eventually i'll have my own robot.  Still, cant go wrong with what's been tried and true as well as supported.