Mindstorms Demo at C=64 Club Robotics Day

Last Saturday I gave a Mindstorms NXt demo at the HCC C=64 Club’s robotics day.  It was held in a small but intimate venue near Utrecht.  I was given 3 large tables in the main room to shows off some of the robots I had built and to tell people all about the NXT.

My omniwheel, Laurens’ Snatcher from his new book, the HTWay and some other stuff	The Lejos Turtle Bot, the BobBot Mk2 and the rest of the table	The EOPD wall follower. Someone added one of the Mindsensors flyers to the end of the paper wall.  The wall follower didn’t really mind at all.

I had lots of people come to the table and ask me about the NXT.  It’s always nice to try to make people enthusiastic about your own hobbies.  I had people of all ages come to me.  One of the visitors, an 86 year old man, told me that he bought the NXT last year and loved it.  So I think LEGO might want to rethink that target age of Mindstorms being 10-13 year old boys!  This man was old enough to be someone’s great grandfather!

The main attractions at my demo were the HTway and the EOPD wall follower.  Both of them pretty much ran non-stop from 09:30 until about 14:30 when I packed up.  The HTway did fall over a few times but that was mainly when it banged into a robot next to it. I don’t think there was a single person who didn’t think there was something magic about its balancing act.  I also had my BobBot Mk2 running in demo mode.  Some found it hard to believe that a “toy” like the NXT could be equipped with a camera like the NXTCam to be used to recognise coloured objects.

The regional radio and TV station RTV Utrecht came by to do some interviews with some of the people who were demonstrating their stuff, including me.  I was a little nervous, of course, it’s not every day that I get a camera or mic shoved in my face.  Anyway, the TV piece features a few of my robots and yours truly.  I hope they don’t disable the embedding as the video isn’t on their YouTube channel just yet.  The report page also has a radio interview.  Please take note that it’s all in Dutch but if you’re curious how that sounds, then by all means watch it.

So there you have it, a great day was had by all who came to visit and those who were there showing off their stuff.  I didn’t get much of a chance to look around as I was at my table almost 99% of the time.  If you’re curious, you can check out more pictures of the meeting here: [LINK].