In celebration of the centenary year of Alan Turing’s birth Jeroen van den Bos and Davy Landman at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam (Netherlands) built a LEGO version of a Turing machine - the universal computing device that theoretically models how all computation is done. You can read about it at LEGO Turing Machine.
Mike Brandl is a fellow LEGO MCP and all-round outstanding LEGO builder. His latest project certainly pushes the envelope when it comes to putting the NXT in a harsh environment. This time he has built a LEGO submarine that can navigate successfully underwater. The NXT is housed in a plastic sealed bag, with glue around the holes for the cables to emerge.
Danny Benedettelli recently provided me with a NXT2WIFI prototype sensor to start development of a leJOS driver for it. I’ve been working on the code in my (limited) spare time and have a basic client and server interface developed in Java. This is available in the latest SVN snapshot of leJOS.
The good people at HumaRobotics sent me a prototype WifiBlock to develop a leJOS driver around. I’m working on this in parallel with the NXT2WIFI driver, so it’s interesting to compare both sensors.
I received a preview paper copy of the new book from NoStarch press titled “Lego Heavy Weapons” by Jack Street. For those of you who don’t know Jack is a young prodigy in the area of Lego gunsmiths as he built is first working Lego gun at the tender age of 13, and has been refining his designs ever since.
This project presents a leJOS class to interface with the NXTBee, along with some sample Java code in leJOS showing how to send and receive data. I’ve written extensively about the Dexter Industries NXTBee sensor before. The NXTBee provides long-range serial wireless communication for the Lego Mindstorms NXT.
The market for Wifi drivers for the NXT is exploding - and not a moment too soon I say! Previously the only way to get your NXT to talk to the big bad Internet was to create a homebrew adapter to a wifi sensor; not a project for the faint-of-heart. But now there are three sensors on (or coming to) the market:
I wanted to draw a live map showing the progress of the Lego Street View car as it drove outside. The dGPS sensor does a great job of plotting the car’s location, and the NXTBee provides a perfect high-speed long-distance serial link back to my Mac at home base. But how to display a live map that is updated with the car’s location in real-time? What platform should I use to develop a user-interface to the control the car and to plot map data?
When I was developing the Lego Street View Car I realised that I needed a way to control the car more reliably than Bluetooth, and without relying on the existing of a wifi network. The NXTBee is the obvious choice. It uses the industry-standard XBee protocol giving high-speed serial transmission over a 300 ft range without any setup or the overhead of Bluetooth communication.
This is the building instructions for the Queboid Shooter robot with built-in Zamor Sphere Shooter.
