Our friends over at Pocket-Lint Pocket have also been checking out all the cool stuff at Toy Fair. Like LEGO’s new Mindstorms NXT kits that have all gone 2.0.
They feature a new sensor that can recognize colors, store them and even display images on the LCD screen. Awesome. More toys for big kids. The kit will run you $280 later this year.
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!
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.
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.
NXT Mindstorms hacker, BlueToothWiki loves Wall-E and he also loves to have a robot clean up after himself. Who doesn’t? Based on a leaked picture alone, the bot won one of the NXTLog building challenges last year and was made entirely out of one NXT retail kit and one 2007 TECHNIC Bulldozer kit. Yes, it actually works and with an ultrasonic sensor it will scoop up trash and clean up. Just don’t leave him alone forever. Video below.
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 Robots are a fact of life. Soon they will kill us. We’d like to document the coming apocalypse. |
