Ramblings

Robotics is great but if you have a lot of kids that want to take part, you’re going to need a fairly large number of sets.  You don’t want to have spend the first 15 minutes of each class rebuilding the base robot for the lessons of that day. Up until now, you could use the ROBOTC Virtual Worlds, which ...

A little while ago, I was asked by Packt Publishing to review one of their new e-books called “Instant LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3” by Gary Garber.  It’s a small (82 pages) e-book that is “A concise guide full of step-by-step recipes to teach you how to build and program an advanced robot.”  It aims to be usable for both an experienced ...

It seems that “due to unprecedented demand”, there is a world-wide shortage of EV3 hardware.  This seems to affect the Educational set which some of LEGO’s distributors are marking as out of stock until March 2014.  I currently have no info on what the situation is on the retail EV3 set.  I’ll update when I know more. I am surprised ...

As most of my readers know, I am not much of a studded LEGO builder, most of my creations are Technic studless LEGO.  When Starch approached me to review this book I wasn’t sure how I was going to be able to do build any of the models in it.  Lucky for me, the models in this book are mostly ...

I did a short talk on the OHM2013 event about hacking the brick.  I spoke about some of the projects I did with the NXT and the things I am doing with the EV3.  In retrospect, I should’ve prepared a little more but I didn’t really have time to do so.  Enjoy (or cringe, whatever you prefer). The video was ...

There’s a very cool new project on Kickstarter: the Pi-Pan, a pan-tilt rig for the Raspberry Pi Camera.  This project has been created by Mindsensors, so you can expect a good product.  As you can see from the screenshot, they’ve more than reached their funding goal and they still have quite a number of days left. The Pi-Pan consists of ...

If you have a CNC machine, which I don’t, and you’re fond of all your limbs, which I am, you may want to take a look at the cool safety guide they made over at RS’s Info Zone.  Click on the picture to go to the full sized one.  Print it out and hang it close to the machine to ...

If you haven’t heard of the OHM2013 event then you’ve probably been living under a bit of a rock.  It’s a truly massive hacking event in the Netherlands that takes place every 4 years (albeit under a different name each time).  This year is extra special because Steven Canvin, the former manager of the MINDSTORMS robotics community, will be there ...

You can now access the ROBOTC forums via the Tapatalk application on your mobile device.  It’s very cool and works like a charm.  I just configured it on my HTC Sensation and it looks great. It’s easy to set up, just download the app via the site above, which will redirect you to either the Windows Phone, Apple or the ...

I wrote about mind maps a while back in an article titled “Freemind: Untangle your Brain”.  Shortly thereafter, I was contacted by Michael Tipper, who runs the site MindmappingShow.com.  For the second episode of his show, “Using Mind Mapping To Create Simplicity Out of Complexity”, he asked me how I used mind maps and how they’ve made a difference in how I ...