Ramblings

Ever wanted to make your NXT robot run along the bottom of a river?  If you can wait until March 2011 you’ll be able to do just that! Robotics Academy, the makers of ROBOTC, are developing a virtual environment where you can run your NXT robot without actually needing the set!  Isn’t that cool? They have a multi-stage plan to ...

Want to control your NXT with your Android phone? Now you can!  This little beauty runs on all Android phones with Android 2.1 and higher.  It’s an official Lego program and it’s available on the market now.  Just scan the QR code on the right there and you could be controlling your shooter bot in less than 2 minutes from ...

Sadly, it looks like the forums on nxtasy.org have gone down for good.  Several attempts to contact the site owner have gone unanswered.  The hosting company, aplus.net, refuses to respond to inquiries or offers of payment from anyone other than the site owner.  In order to provide a more stable source for the kind of LEGO MINDSTORMS discussions that the ...

The “Minifig Vomit Mobile” is what my friend Marc-Andre called the omniwheel I took the video of.  I felt that in order for that name to be more accurate, I had to add a minifig to the robot, so here he is, on the left.  Unfortunately, this one has no internal organs, being a skeleton and all, so there is, ...

Sunday morning and all is quiet in the Soldaat house.  This is the current state of my Lego Lair, as my wife likes to call it. It’s a bit of a mess and I’m starting to have trouble finding things on my desk.  When I am done writing this post, I’ll do some tidying up. Some cool things I’m working ...

This morning the mailman had another package for me!  It was a padded envelope with nothing less than the 4 Technic axle compatible holonomic wheel prototypes from Rotacaster.  I haven’t had a chance to build anything with them but my first impressions are: Very compact, they’re about 3.5 units wide and about 6 units in diameter; Quiet!  They’re all plastic, ...

Thanks to a very generous person named Thorsten on the ROBOTC forums I am now the proud owner of A RCX 2.0 brick An IR Tower An RCX remote control (not pictured) A USB<->Serial converter I’ve been asked in the past to add support to my ROBOTC drivers for communicating with an RCX using the HiTechnic IR Link sensor.  It ...

The Ukrainian company Holit Data Systems, makers of the 3 port NXT motor MUX, asked me to let people know that they’ve changed their domain name at the request of TLG. You can now reach their website at edu.holit.ua. They’re busy working getting PayPal payments sorted out.  It should all be up and running by next month (August 2010).  You’ll ...

When YouTube was still a separate entity from Google, I had created both a Google account and YouTube account with the same usernames.  This was fine until the accounts started being merged.  I clicked some links to try and do this but accidentally created a new YouTube account that was now permanently linked to my existing Google account.  I still ...

My good friend Eric likes to build big.  He is one of the designers and builders of the High Bay Storage System. A while back he told he wanted to build a tracked vehicle. He’s done this before, of course: Very nice, right? Not satisfied with this Lilliputian-sized tank (actual Lilliputians ride around in this), he set about making something ...