DominoBot NXT (ver1)
May 2006: Update: DominoBotNXT has been enhanced. See DominoBot2. For those who do not know about the Lego Mindstorms Developer Program (MDP), back in January of 2006 Lego was seeking assistance from the Lego community on their next generation Mindstorms product (NXT). Approx 9600 people applied to become one of the 100 MDP's. In late February, I received an invitation to participate and of course jump at the opportunity. For a few months, the group…
DominoBot 2
DominoBot 2 was my take on re-creating my original DominoBot. After I had finished the original, I found ways to make it more efficient and better at what the original did. I also did not have the limitations of the parts supplied with the RIS and UBS sets. One of the parts that needed re-designing was the mechanism used to force domino's out of the chamber. The original tended to have difficulties at times. I…
Walker
I managed to re-work an old design. By using 2 motors and drive mechanisms, I was able to get the walker to steer. The key to steering is the syncro mechanism that I setup. It uses 2 touch sensors - 1 on each of the left and right center drive legs. Using NQC, the code will monitor the timing of the rotations. It goes something like this: When sensor #1 is triggered - is sensor…
MarbleMiser I
Marble Miser was designed to meet the challenge of the 4th Annual Lego Robotics Competition / Get together at U of T in Toronto Ontario. Many thanks to Calum and the boys for putting this together. It was the first event that I was able to attend, and it was a great time. The turnout yielded many more entrants than initially expected. To find out more about the event, visit RTL Toronto Website. Now to…
DominoBot
It had been a few months since I built my last robot (Climber). During the early summer of 2002, I received an email from Syngress. They had indicated that they were going to create a series of "10 Cool Lego Mindstorms " books, and invited me to produce a model for one of them. For some time I had the idea of building a robot that could mimic the activity of laying down dominos on…
MarbleMiser 2
MarbleMiser2 takes First Place in RTL15 - Deep Yellow Robotics Event here in Toronto. It was a great day. The competition consisted of 2 events. The first being Connect Four, the second being Marble Sorting. There were 9 robots competing in the Marble Sorting competition. All of which were great designs. Some robots (including MarbleMiser2) were designed to move around the field while picking up marbles and throwing out the opponents colour. Others used more…
Recycler
One of my first robots. Built to demonstrate simple navigation and pickup rotines. This is the back of the robot. It shows the pneumatics engagement component. When the front sensor is triggered, this gear shifts the CAM beam, which in turn changes the valve of the pneumatics. This will open or close the claw. (more…)