Tag Archives: Mindstorms

These files have existed for a little while now but I never got the official OK to distribute them.  However, one of my readers (Marius Steffen) was given two Dropbox links via LEGO Customer Support to these specific files.  That must mean that the documentation is no longer under NDA and so I now feel no reason not share them ...

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 ...

I downloaded most of these background pictures from the LEGO EDUCATION website via some Google searching.  They’re very nice high-res images of their models.  The reason I picked the LEGO EDUCATION images is because they’re less busy than the retail ones and have a beautifully clean, uncluttered and white background.  Both these themes are essentially the same but one uses ...

Tristan from Tris10.com (yeah, very clever domain name!) sent me a FindBall NXT and EmitIR to play with and write a ROBOTC driver for. The FindBall NXT The FindBall NXT is a sensor specifically made to locate a 40KHz modulated IR signal, as used by the RoboCup Junior balls.  Tris10 claim that it is currently the best sensor for this ...

When Damien Kee asked me to write a review for his latest book, the first thought that came to my mind was “Uhm, I am not a teacher! How am I supposed to have an opinion on this?”.  Truth be told, I have done quite a few workshops in classrooms with kids, adults and a mix of both.  So while ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

If you’re a fan of C#, then you will love Monobrick, a communication library that works with the EV3.  It uses the EV3’s direct commands to remote control the brick.  It works with both the NXT and the EV3.  You can simply import the library into your project and start hacking away. A simple example: using System; using MonoBrick.EV3; public ...