Robots

The long awaited EV3 building and programming book by Laurens Valk is finally available!  It’s called “The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Discovery Book” and it’s 370+ pages of awesomeness. Where to start?  The book has been printed in full colour, which is a massive improvement over his previous book and a real pleasure to read.  The colours are very bright and ...

In my last post about the VEX IQ building system I had a small video featuring my VEX Quadruped.  I’ve done a bit of work on it since then and the gait has been greatly improved.  I also added some small rubber feet on the legs.  These are the traction links from the Tank Tread & Intake Kit. Due to ...

What is VEX IQ VEX IQ is the latest offering from VEX. It’s a complete modular robotics system to complement their VEX Cortex range.  The VEX IQ is positioned at a younger audience, from the age of about 8.  It uses plastic parts instead of the Cortex metal parts. Using pins, plates and connector pieces, it is easy to build ...

Mirobot is a very cool open source robotics kit that’s completely open source and very affordable.  When I was contacted by Ben Pirt, the man behind this project, I was admittedly a little skeptical about yet another robotics system.  However, this robotics kit seems very nice and sports some very cool features: Super easy to build, it takes just two ...

The firmware used by National Instruments and Robomatter for their respective programming environments has been pushed to Github.  It is based on the sources of LEGO’s firmware version 1.05A.  Please note that only the master branch has been pushed out, the private development branches will remain as such. The extended firmware sports a number of improvements, including: opcodes to turn ...

It’s here!  The first beta of ROBOTC for EV3 has arrived! It took a bit longer than we’d hoped for but the wait is over.  You can now program your EV3 with ROBOTC.  This is the first public beta and as with all betas, there will be some missing features and bugs.  The basic functionality is mostly all there: General ...

One of my readers, Elias Barcia, mailed me back in May 2013 to ask for some input for a university project he was working on: make the three generations of MINDSTORMS, RCX, NXT and EV3 communicate with eachother.  I gave him some feedback and pointers and some time passed.  I had all but forgotten about it until he mailed me ...

Virtual Router Manager In an earlier article, I had written about how to allow your EV3 to connect to your laptop (or desktop) with a shared WiFi network, using a feature called Hosted Network.  It essentially turns your computer into an Access Point (AP).  Since then I’ve had a bit more experience with it and I’ve found a very easy ...

The EV3 has a lot of cool features but a push-to-eject micro-SD card drive isn’t one of them.  It’s fine for users who don’t work with custom Linux distributions on their brick, but a major PITA (no, not the Döner Kebab kind) if you’re like me.  It takes a needle nose pliers and a lot of patience to remove the ...

Ralph Hempel is no stranger to MINDSTORMS and he’s been quietly working on something very special: a port of Debian Wheezy on the EV3.  The folks of the Debian organisation wouldn’t let him use the Debian name (for copyright reasons), so this project is called ev3dev. What is ev3dev? It’s a complete Linux distribution for the EV3.  What do I ...