As a first blog entry this might be quite sub standard but I’m going to give it my best shot. Recently I had the opportunity to play with the Lego Mindstorm kit. Who would of thought getting your degree could be so much fun? The anticipation and excitement as i opened the box was reminiscent of the chaos i caused every Christmas morning of my childhood. The instruction were tossed aside and a shower of Lego pieces vacated their correct compartments and scattered noisily all over the desk. after a good half an hour of random, unsuccessful compilations of Lego pieces and the Lego Nxt brain itself i decided it might be time to admit defeat.
The Nxt might at first glance appear to be a playful, naive, toy but when you start researching its capabilities the possibilities are endless. The simplicity and speed at which the Nxt can be manipulated makes it an awesome tool for prototyping. Once i spent some time to read the instructions and followed some of the basic tutorials i was hooked. There is something quite liberating about just clipping components together and instantly setting them to work. One of the only things negative i have to say about the Nxt is that i found the software quite tiresome. Maybe after messing with code for so long i have conditioned my self for a top down style of thinking where as the Lego software was very visual based heavily upon drag and drop. After a little research i found a class library for C# entitled MindSqualls and this opened up a whole world of possibilities. MindSqualls can be downloaded here along with a lot of documentation and tutorials.
The end result – His name is Mo-B (Haven’t a clue why just seemed right 😛 )
Some inspiring robots from others and places for more information:
automatedChaos 