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(…)
This is the building instructions for the Queboid Shooter robot with built-in Zamor Sphere Shooter.
The World Robot Olympiad was held in Abu Dhabi, UAE in November 2011. I was one of the fortunate LEGO fans invited along to demonstrate to the leaders of tomorrow how LEGO has no boundaries when you use your imagination. Children from all over the world came to compete in the finals for robot building(…)
My Queboid robot has been around for a while, but for the World Robot Olympiad event in Abu Dhabi this year I decided to add a Zamor sphere shooter to the basic model. I swapped out the power function motors to use NXT motors. The idea was that kids could drive the robot using Philo’s joystick design communicating over Bluetooth from(…)
You might remember the original Lego Street View Car I built in April. It was very popular at the Google Zeitgeist event earlier this year. I wanted to re-build the car to only use the Lego Mindstorms NXT motors. I was also keen to make it look more….car-like. The result, after 4 months of experimentation, is version 2.0(…)
For this project I wanted to build a webserver using the new Dexter Industries Wifi sensor for the NXT. Dexter have produced a very exciting wifi sensor that you program through the RS485 port on port 4 of your NXT. The RS485 port can communicate with the wifi sensor at speeds up to 921600 baud, so your NXT(…)
One of the biggest challenges developing programs on the NXT is fixing them when they go wrong. The NXT has a small screen with only 8 lines of text displayed. It’s difficult to know what is causing a program to fail, and to have a record of what a program did. I created this logging(…)
This project is a LEGO version of the Google Street View Car. I’ve been working on this project for the guts of six months now, and you can probably see why! It all started when was playing with the dGPS sensor from Dexter Industries, and realised that if I combined this sensor, with a robust chassis and a camera(…)
I was invited to attend the Google Zeitgeist Europe conference in London in 2011 as a member of the LEGO team displaying “cool” projects for the attendees. It was an amazing event, and I got to meet Prof. Stephen Hawking among other luminaries attending! I brought my LEGO Street View Car (version 1) along with(…)
The Dexter Industries dGPS device provides the NXT with access to a real-time GPS sensor. The dGPS is a very useful device is you plan to do any mobile robotics that involve navigation and path-planning. Not only can it tell your robot where it is, but it will also give the direction of travel, speed(…)