Apparently a couple of guys hooked up two Wii Fit balance boards to LEGO Mindstorms and made them move in sync with leaning and jumping motions. While I don’t think this game is going to get you fit, it’s a clever hack. Maybe Nintendo can change the Lego things into battle bots and market the whole deal as some sort of Ultimate robot fighter game for the those who don’t mind obesity all that much. Hacking Wii-Fit isn’t new, but this one puts a whole new spin on things. Pretty neat!
The craziest application built for Pownce yet? This my friends is a robot that pours beer when sent a Pownce message! It may be the best thing ever. All it takes is a quick post from your iPhone and the robot pours a nice cold beer. The Lego Mindstorms robot was created by Matt Reid for Barcamp Nashville. Sweet!
I know I’ve done a fair share of robot bashing in my day. It seems like roughly every 24 hours I crank out a new article about how robots are gunna kill us and eat our faces and rape our fembots, but not everybody looks on robots with the same fear and loathing I do. There are artists among us who see the muse in a shiny metal ass. These people look at robotics and draw inspiration from it, and the results are spectacular.
If you’re interested in robot art then take a gander at the fish with braids gallery. They’re having a robot art exhibit in Jersey City. With stuff like Fred Kluth’s robot comics, a biology/technology perspective from Sean Montgomery, and $17,500 giant lego robot sculptures by Eric Sophie, the show is sure to capture your imagination. I hate robots but I love me some robo-art.
Droids as a fashion statement. These R2D2 Lego Cufflinks. When you absolutely have to dress up, you may as well throw some geek into your outfit. These $16 R2-D2 Cufflinks will make wearing a suit and tie a bit more bearable.
I know. I know. Your first thought is to run in terror, because there’s something hypnotically creepy in the way it walks. And it’s dead quiet too. It is made of Legos, which should help me to feel calm, but it just doesn’t help. This monstrosity was inspired by a Theo Jansen BMW commercial from way back. That doesn’t help either. And I just know I’m gonna see this in my dreams, chasing me. BMW commercial below. Read the rest of this entry »
Bazmarc from the Trossen Robotics Community Forums has built a Lego Wall-E that kills all others dead. It’s the Lego NXT Autonomous Wall-E Robot! Of course it looks like Wall-E, but also has some impressive features. It’s a TRC Project Contest entry and though they haven’t even announced the contest yet, I can’t imagine anything else beating this little guy.
Technical specs: Technical specs: 1 Mindstorms NXT with rechargable pack, 3 Lego NXT Servo Motors, 4 Lego PowerFonctions motors, 2 PF IR receiver, 1 UltraSonic sensor, 1 Sound sensor, 1 InfraRed link sensor, (HiTechnic), 1 NXTservo module and 1 mini RC servo, (Mindsensors), 10 AA batteries, Lego parts mainly from the Bulldozer set #8275 and other parts from various technic sets.
A couple weeks ago we told you about the H.A.L.E. project that used Lego Mindstorms robots to take and send high-altitude pics from a weather balloon. Today brings more Lego news. It’s called the Tilted Twister. Created by a Swedish man named Hans Andersen, this robot was built from a Mindstorms NXT kit that Andersen had purchased for his daughters, but, he says, “they have not had much access to it yet.”
“After building a tribot and a line follower I wanted to create something more spectacular.”
Andersen faced a number of challenges when he took on this project. A major problem was that the optical sensor with the kit only detects grayscale, so some of the different colors on a Rubik’s cube looked identical to the bot. (He managed to avoid this problem by changing the cube’s square colors). Andersen coded the robot in C on his computer, but found that the program ran much slower when he ported it to the NXT bot. His first algorithm solved the cube in 97 moves. Andersen further tweaked the bot, and his current algorithm solves the Rubik’s cube in just 60 moves.
On his website he describes his process in more detail and has also made the code available.
This is definitely a cool project–sure, the name sounds like a carnival ride, but we can turn a blind eye on that in light of the fact that Rubik’s cubes are hard, and this thing dominates one in 60 tilted twists.
Lego Education and National Instruments have developed an interactive robotics kit for kids at the elementary school level. The kit will let students learn the basics of robotics programming with its built in NI LabVIEW software that gives them an easy interface. It describes complex robotics technology in the simplest possible way. Let a new future of geeks and robots begin.
Last Tuesday, a bunch of professors, students and robotics enthusiasts launched H.A.L.E. (High Altitude Lego Extravaganza).
What is it? Seven Lego Mindstorms robots attached to a weather balloon, which exploded at 30km over the Earth’s surface. Don’t worry, they dropped back safely via parachute and even took photographs of the ascent and descent.
Whether the professors know it or not, they just gave these bots some paratrooper training. It ain’t no different then army guys jumping out of a plane. These bots now have intel they will need to hit us from the air one day. Sure they took pics for the professors, but what did they take for them? Anyway, hit the link for some awesome pics.
I know I’ve done a fair share of robot bashing in my day. It seems like roughly every 24 hours I crank out a new article about how robots are gunna kill us and eat our faces and rape our fembots, but not everybody looks on robots with the same fear and loathing I do. There are artists among us who see the muse in a shiny metal ass. These people look at robotics and draw inspiration from it, and the results are spectacular.
A couple weeks ago we told you about the 
