LEGO Mindstorms NXT

Welcome

Welcome to the LEGO Mindstorms section of the site. I recently purchased the new Mindstorms NXT kit and have been slowly learning how everything works and can already tell it will be another fun hobby to add to my repetoire of hobbies.

A friend of mine wanted me to take some pictures, so I figured why not just add it to the site for anyone else interested to see. So I hope to have some pictures up pretty soon as well as some code and programs and anything else that might be of interest regarding Mindstorms.

Furthermore I've been doing some research and found out that Kennedy Space Center will be hosting the World Space Expo this year and one of the exibitors will be a local Lego league Team (information is scarce at the moment), so I'll have to check that out :)

TriBot

This is the 'beginner' robot, the TriBot. It gets you up and running with a simple robot for the purposes of learning how to program the NXT and how the various sensors work. I've taken this picture on the practice 'course' as well. It's essentially a fold-out poster type thing with a start point and a black oval border serving as both a line you can program your robots to follow or as a boundary line for performing activities within the oval. This particular robots main focus is the claws at the end that are used for picking up the little red and blue balls. Like I said, it's essentiallyt he 'noob' robot for learning the NXT and the programming environment.

Sensors

The kit comes with a few different sensors: Light Sensor, Ultrasonic Sensor, Sound Sensor and Rotation Sensors, which are conveniently built into the physical motors.

The light sensor is able to detect various colors including ultraviolet colors that humans cannot see, this gives it quite a bit of versatility. This would normally be used for detecting changes in color on a playfield, such as the mat that comes with the kit.

The ultrasonic sensor is by far the coolest sensor, as it functions very similar to a bat by sending out sound waves at a very high frequency (we cannot hear them) and then it measures the time it takes to bounce off an object and come back. Obviously the purpose of this sensor is for measuring distance and detecting obstacles.

The sound sensor is capable of detecting sounds, just like the light sensor, it is capable of detecting sounds the human ear cannot hear, this can be used to wait for special notes or sounds that might tell the robot to do perform some action or log some information etc.

The rotation sensors are built into the three motors that come with the kit. In the original RCX, the motors did not have this capability and due to this it could not accurately measure distances travelled etc. These rotation sensors are very accurate and can reliably report how many rotations the wheels have turned.

Note

This page like many of the others on this site is a work in progress, eventually I'll figure out what exactly I'm doing with this and better organize things.