Civilian RC Car Uses Lego NXT And Ada

March 14, 2020 by 4 Comments

Back in the last century, the US Department of Defense declared that Ada was going to be used everywhere and for everything. Books were published, schools build curriculum. Working programmers, however, filled out waivers to continue working in their languages of choice. As a result, only a little bit of safety-critical software really used Ada. However, we’ve noticed a bit of a resurgence lately. Case in point: an RC car using Ada for the brains. You can watch it tool around in the video below.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about Ada in the past few months. Partially, this could be because of the availability of the GNU compiler, although that’s been around since 1995, so maybe there’s another explanation. Ada’s strong typing does tend to plug holes that hackers exploit, so while we would hate to say it is hack proof, it certainly is hack resistant compared to many popular languages.

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Self-Balancing Robot Uses Android And Lego NXT

July 16, 2014 by 21 Comments

LEGO NXT + Android = Self Balancing Robot

Self-balancing robots are pretty cool, but sometimes a bit too complex to make. [HippoDevices] shows us that it’s really not that hard, and you can even do it with Lego NXT and an Android device!

First step is to build your two-wheeled robot – go nuts! As long as the Lego NXT motors are strong enough you’ll be able to make most different shaped robots easy to balance. You’re going to need an Android ADK board to provide communication between the Lego motors and your Android device. [HippoDevices] is using their own design, called the Hippo-ADK which is on Kickstarter currently.

This allows your Android device to read the status and control the Lego Motors — from there it’s just a matter of programming it to balance according to the device’s gyroscope.

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I Am NXT 3-Point Bend Tester. Please Insert Girder.

December 29, 2013 by 3 Comments

Learning with visuals can be very helpful.  Learning with models made from NXT Mindstorms is just plain awesome, as [Rdsprm] demonstrates with this LEGO NXT 3-point bend tester that he built to introduce freshmen to flexural deflection and material properties. Specifically, it calculates Young’s modulus using the applied force of a spring and the beam’s deflection. [Rdsprm] provides a thorough explanation in the About section of the YouTube video linked above, but the reddit comments are definitely a value-add.

[Rdsprm] built this from the Mindstorms education base set (9797) and the education resource set (9648). Each contestant endures a 5-test battery and should produce the same result each time. The motor in the foreground sets the testing length of the beam, and the second motor pulls the spring down using a gearbox and chain.

This method of deflection testing is unconventional, as [Rdsprm] explains. Usually, the beam is loaded incrementally, with deflection measured at each loading state. Here, the beam is loaded continuously. Vertical deflection is measured with a light sensor that reads a bar code scale on the beam as it passes by. The spring position is calculated and used to determine the applied force.

[Rdsprm] analysed the fluctuation in GNU Octave and has graphs of the light sensor readings and force-deflection. No beams to bend with your Mindstorms? You could make this Ruzzle player instead.

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NXT Android Telepresence Robot

August 2, 2012 by 3 Comments

Here is a telepresence robot that uses an Android device and LEGO NXT parts. [Wolfgang] had an extra phone on hand and decided to put it to good use. The Mindstorm parts make it really easy to produce a small robot, and adding the phone really ups the computing and connectivity options available to him.

The Android device is able to control the NXT bot via Bluetooth. [Wolfgang] didn’t go into detail on that part, but you can get some pointers on the topic from this other Android controlled Mindstorm project. [Wolfgang] wanted the ability to check in at home when he’s travelling. He uses nanohttpd on the Android device to serve up a simple web interface. It uses HTML5 to push a snapshot from the phone’s camera as user feedback, and provides a set of directional arrows which let him drive the bot around.

Obviously this thing is going to run out of juice if he’s away for too long. To combat that problem he included a battery which powers both the NXT parts and the phone. Now he just needs to build an inductive charging station and he’ll really be set.

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Lego NXT Creations Are Even Cooler With WiFi On Board

November 12, 2011 by 2 Comments

nxt-wifi

The folks at Dexter Industries have just wrapped up a week of Lego NXT projects, most of which centered on the use of their NXT WiFi sensor. Developed over the last few months, the group has been hard at work refining their design and getting some of the kinks worked out, so now you too can control your NXT creations sans wires.

The demonstrations have covered various topics throughout the week, starting out with a short tutorial on how to use a computer to communicate with the NXT device using the TCP protocol. After taking a look at WiFi power-saving capabilities, they touched on pinging other networked machines as well as querying DNS records from an NXT device. An NXT-based webserver was the next project on the list, as was remote robot control over the Internet. Finally, they wrapped the week up by configuring their Lego robot to send a tweet.

If getting your NXT creations on the move with full-fledged network access is something that sounds interesting, be sure to check out their site for downloads, a WiFi manual, and more.

NXT Machine Sorts LEGO Blocks Automatically

April 8, 2011 by 15 Comments

Smart people don’t put their toys away, they build machines to do it for them. Case and point: this NXT project which can sort LEGO pieces. Just dump a bucket of random blocks in a hopper on one end of the machine. One slice at a time, these plastic pieces will be lifted onto a conveyor system made up of several different belts, which allows for separation of the parts. One block at a time, each piece enters a specially lighted chamber where they are visually identified by the NXT brick. Once it identifies the block, a carousel of plastic containers rotates to place the correct home for the block below the output shoot seen above.

So do we now have a completed LEGO circle of life? Not quite. You can build structures automatically using a 3D LEGO printer and this sorter will have no problem organizing the parts for that purpose. But we still need a LEGO machine that can tear assembled bricks apart.

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Android Controlling Mindstorms NXT

August 2, 2010 by 13 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEEVwf6E10M]

Here’s an Android device controlling a LEGO Mindstorms robot. [Josh] and a couple of his colleagues developed software to get both Android 2.1 (video above) and Android 1.6 (video) to work as Bluetooth control devices. The NXT cube is running leJOS, a Java virtual machine, allowing you to program Mindstorms using Java. Although their code is at an early Alpha stage, this shows that it works and is a very welcomed tool for NXT development once they get to a more stable point and release it to the masses.