The book is written by Jack Streat, a young man, who is very well known for his very realistic and fully functional LEGO weapons.

The building instructions are absolutely stunning to see and a real pleasure to work with.  Making BIs for models with mostly black bricks must be a real challenge and I’ve seen many from LEGO that were not nearly as easy to read as these.  My hat goes off to you, Jack Streat.  If you don’t want to take my word for it, take a look at the excerpt: [LINK].

Below is a cool video of the weapons you can build from the instructions in the book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTlwORrp_WA

You should check out his YouTube channel as well if you have a moment, you won’t be disappointed.

So, the book has instructions for four weapons in total:

• Desert Eagle handgun with blowback action,
• AKS-74U assault rifle with folding stock,
• Bolt-action Lee Enfield sniper rifle (aka. Jungle Carbine)
• Pump-action SPAS 12 combat shotgun.

If you click on the images below you can see a much bigger picture with a short description of the actual model.

If you love building cool looking models with intricate mechanisms, even if you’re not into guns, then this book is for you.

LEGO Heavy Weapons

By Jack Streat
May 2012, 368 pp., $24.95 USD
ISBN 9781593274122

Available in fine bookstores everywhere, from www.oreilly.com/nostarch or directly from No Starch Press (www.nostarch.com, orders@nostarch.com, +1.415.863.9900).

ABOUT NO STARCH PRESS

Founded in 1994, No Starch Press publishes the finest in geek entertainment—unique books on technology, with a focus on open source, security, hacking, programming, alternative operating systems, LEGO, science, and math. Our titles have personality, our authors are passionate, and our books tackle topics that people care about. Visit http://www.nostarch.com

After a rocky start where Eric was thoroughly confused trying to rebuild Vassilis C’s (Nextstorm) boxing robots, we prepared the room with laptop and a tonne of Technic LEGO parts and NXTs for people to build robots.

The original idea was that there would be sumo matches between teams but things took a different turn.

People seemed to just do their own thing, build robots, program line followers, Martijn, Eric and I just helped when and where we could and let things take their course.  I think fun was had by all but I think in all we had only a few true sumo matches during the whole day.  I witnessed one of them, which was an epic battle between the robot you see on the right and a standard sumo robot that Martijn built.  It had rather scary looking antlers and a some spinning blades on the front that would lift and push the opponent out of its way.  Its owner was as proud as a peacock, of course, and was more than happy to pose with his creation.

The demo room where we had a couple of robots on display for people to play with and look at.	The sumo building room.  Lots of dads and their kids building robots.

A line following robot, programmed in ROBOTC.	Three sumo robots that actually ended up competing, very cool!

It was a real blast and fun was had by all!

This version supports the following Arduino platforms:

• Diecimila
• Duemilanove
• Uno
• Mega 1280
• Mega 2560 (The Google ADK boards, like the Mindsensors Teemino, are based on this)

Please note that in order to use the ADK boards, you will need to replace the bootloader, which

requires an actual programmer.

More information on this release can be found here: [LINK].

ROBOTC for Arduino Known Issues (328P Based): [LINK]
ROBOTC for Arduino Known Issues (MEGA Based): [LINK]

A changelog will follow, most likely after the weekend, so stay tuned.

I would suggest you add SF.net Operations to your Twitter feeds, if you haven’t already.

Yes, that’s right, you can reach out and play with Laurens’ Alpha Rex over the Big Interwebs!  He made a cool looking web interface for it and allows you check out what it’s doing via a webcam!

I did something similar a while back but not nearly as cool looking as this!  Go check it out before it’s taken down.  I got to play with it last night before it was up and it’s so awesome.

The sensor he’s using is one of the cool new HumaRobotics WiFiBlocks.

Dear LEGO fan,

The LEGO fan community is important to us. To improve and support the LEGO fan community we have partnered with Aarhus University, Denmark, and DePaul University, Chicago, to carry out this survey. The survey is part of a large ongoing research project aimed at better understanding user activities and interactions in communities.

We would greatly appreciate if you would complete the questionnaire (see link below). It will take you approx. 20-30 minutes. Please note that you must be at least 13 years old to take this survey.

The survey ends by May, 17, 2012 (midnight GMT). All responses are strictly confidential. We will share the top line findings (in English) with you once we have analyzed the data (approximately end of June 2012) through the LEGO Ambassadors.

Thank you very much for your help!

Kind regards,
Jan Beyer, Community Operations Manager EU/Asia
James Foulds, Community Operations Senior Manager, Americas/Australia
Tormod Askildsen, Head of the LEGO Community Events & Engagement team

• Survey in English: [LINK]
• Survey in German:[LINK]
• Survey in Spanish:[LINK]
• Survey in Korean: [LINK]

I’ve added support for the HumaRobotics WiFiBlock WiFI sensor.  I’ve also been very busy the past two weeks working on a tutorial for the driver suite. This release also contains a couple of example programs that are discussed in the tutorial.

Changelog

* Added new driver + test program for HumaRobotics WiFiBlock.

* Added additional test programs for Dexter Industries dCompass, Mindsensors ACCL-Nx and HiTechnic Gyroscope.

Where can I download it?

You can get it at the usual place: [LINK].

The tutorial will help you setup ROBOTC to use the drivers, how the they’re put together and most importantly, how to use them.  I’ve created three examples which go through the steps needed to write a program from scratch using the Driver Suite.  I even made 3 videos to with those examples!  Yeah, I pulled out all the stops to make this one, let me tell you.  I would’ve added a small brass band, but I ran out of disk space.

I couldn’t possibly cover going through the process of creating a new program with every single driver included in the Suite, there are simply too many of them. 

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it and I hope it’ll be useful to you in some way.  Let me know how you like it or what you’d like to see improved or added.

You can download the tutorial right here: [LINK].  You’ll need a PDF reader to read it.  I recommend you use something like Foxit Reader.

Thanks for taking the time to write it up!

• An interview with Jørgen Vig Knudstorp (LEGO’s CEO)
• Part 1 of a LEGO Pneumatics tutorial by none other than Kevin Clague
• An article by Lee Magpili about his Gaga Robots (not Lady Gaga)
• A report on the Mobile World Congress – Social Web of Things
• And much, much more!

Download your very own copy of HB013 right here: [LINK].