Collaborate Disseminate
Like to see dominoes fall? [JK Brickworks] has got what you need, in the form of a never-ending ring of falling and resetting tiles. LEGO pieces are the star in this …read more Continue reading Domino Ring Machine Tips Tiles In a Never-ending Wave
When there are so many single board computers and other products aimed at providing children with the means to learn about programming and other skills, it is easy to forget …read more Continue reading End Of An Era, As LEGO To Discontinue Mindstorms
Sad news for kids and adults alike as Lego announces the end of the Mindstorms line. The much-wish-listed line of robotics construction toys will be discontinued by the end of …read more Continue reading Hackaday Links: October 30, 2022
When Lego introduced its Mindstorms line in 1998, in a lot of ways it was like a gateway drug into the world of STEM, even though that term wouldn’t be invented for another couple of years. Children and the obsolete children who begat them drooled over the possibility of combining …read more
It probably won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this, but hackers and makers absolutely love LEGO. We think you’d be hard pressed to find a Hackaday reader, young or old, that hasn’t spent some quality time with the little plastic bricks from Billund, Denmark. So it follows that there’s a considerable community of individuals who leverage their better than average technical prowess to utilize LEGO in new and unique ways. But the activities and history of these LEGO hackers is not exactly common knowledge to those who aren’t heavily vested in the hobby.
During the recent FOSSCON 2018 …read more
Continue reading FOSSCON 2018: Where Open Source and LEGO Collide
Mechanum wheels are great, but you have to have them perfectly alined or they come across a little clunky, giving your robot a herky-jerky movement. Robotics educator and supreme LEGO builder [Yoshihito Isogawa] built a mechanum-wheeled rover that has the angles right: each wheel consists of 12 smaller rubber tires angled at 45 degrees. The key to the project is Part Number 85940, accurately if unsexily named “double Ø4.85 hole w/ Ø3.2 shaft”. It consists of a double technic hole with a shaft projecting in a 45-degree angle.
Unlike his omni-roller project with 3 large wheels and the mechanum tank …read more
Continue reading Freakishly Agile Crawler Rocks All-LEGO Mechanum Wheels
When we see what [Jason Allemann] does with LEGO, we wonder why more one-offs aren’t made this way. This time he’s made a Halloween mechanical marvel that will surely scare more kids than anything else they’ll encounter on their rounds — so much so that many may even decline the chocolate it dispenses. Who wouldn’t when to get it you have to reach over an animatronic skeleton hand that may grab you while a similarly mechanized spider may lunge onto your hand.
The chocolate dispensing, the hand and the spider are all animated using four motors, a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 …read more
Continue reading Mechanical Marvel Trades Courage for Chocolate
When we see what [Jason Allemann] does with LEGO, we wonder why more one-offs aren’t made this way. This time he’s made a Halloween mechanical marvel that will surely scare more kids than anything else they’ll encounter on their rounds — so much so that many may even decline the chocolate it dispenses. Who wouldn’t when to get it you have to reach over an animatronic skeleton hand that may grab you while a similarly mechanized spider may lunge onto your hand.
The chocolate dispensing, the hand and the spider are all animated using four motors, a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 …read more
Continue reading Mechanical Marvel Trades Courage for Chocolate
[Bram], a 17-year-old robot fan from the Nertherlands, had an opportunity to watch a RoboCup soccer match played by autonomous robots, and was inspired to create his own Mindstorms version of the robot for a school project.
The robot he created is around 80 cm in diameter and is controlled by four daisy-chained EV bricks. There are nine large motors for controlling the wheels, two more large motors for grabbing the ball, and two medium motors for the ball-shooting mechanism. It uses a Pixycam for ball detection, and it can identify and move toward the ball so long as it’s …read more
Continue reading Mindstorms Soccer Robot Inspired by Real Soccer Robot
A group of embedded developers from Sioux Embedded Systems in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, wanted to get experience working on Microsoft .Net. To make it fun they made it their project to produce a LEGO train with visitors at LEGO World, the official LEGO convention in Denmark. The team developed an application in C# to fully automate the train, with Mindstorms NXT and EV3 bricks as well as LEGO Power Functions motors controlling everything.
The train project carries a simple premise: the visitor chooses one of four colors, and the train goes and picks up a piece of simulated candy with …read more
Continue reading Monster Mindstorms Delta Bot Delicately Picks Candy