[Will] from Revolt Lab needed a project to get the summer campers he supervises interested in electronics, but when your audience is 5 years old, your subject matter had better be simple, yet interesting enough to hold their attention at length. He settled on using a Lego NXT robot to keep their little minds engaged, because who doesn’t like robots?

He picked up a basic Lego NXT kit and paged through the manual. The first “example” robot looked pretty cool so he decided to give it a shot, though he still hadn’t figured out exactly what he would have the robot do. Inspiration struck, and he decided that he could take advantage of the NXT’s color sensor as well as its proximity sensor to construct a balloon hunting robot.

He constructed a “balloon corral” to keep the balloons in place and the kids out of his thumbtack-wielding robot’s reach. He let his creation loose, and as you can see in the video below, the robot hunts down the blue balloon and pops it, much to the children’s delight.

If you’re in the position to introduce a group of young kids to electronics, this balloon popping robot paired with some conductive Play Dough would make for a fun and educational afternoon workshop.

[Arthur Sacek] has really got something with the 3D Mill he built entirely from LEGO pieces. As you can see, it uses NXT parts to control the cutter head along three axes. The drill bit that acts as the mill’s cutting head is not a LEGO part, but that’s [Arthur's] only transgression.

The demo sculpture seen above was cut into a block of floral foam. The model was processed by Autodesk Softimage before being fed into the mill, where it took about two and half hours to complete the job. The foam comes out still in block form looking like a piece of outdoor carpeting. That’s because there’s no debris removal during the milling process. But hit it with the shopvac and you’ll reveal a physical model with surprising detail. We don’t think it comes close to the light-cured resin printing we’ve seen, but it would be a great asset if you’re doing some mold making.

Don’t miss [Arthur's] video of the milling process after the break.

Flapjacks taste infinitely better when they’re machine-made. Well, that’s true for [Mexican Viking] who built an automatic pancake maker to the delight of his family.

Obviously, the building material of choice is Lego. The machine consists of a base with two linear gears on either side. A gantry is held high above this base, travelling upon geared towers to either side. The writing nozzle, fashioned out of ketchup bottles, can move back and forth along this gantry for a full range of motion along the X and Y axes. Lego pneumatic pumps supply pressurized air which forces the batter out of the bottle reservoir. This dispensing system is extremely clever and worth reading a bit more about. But if you just want us to make with the good stuff, you can see it grilling up pancakes in the video after the break.

The only thing missing is automatic flipping.

[Thanks Hackadayisgreat via Gizmodo]

[Mark] was playing around with a small GPS sensor when a light bulb lit over his head. He imagined it would be pretty cool to replicate one of Google’s Street View cars at a fraction of the scale using Lego NXT parts. He figured it would be easy enough to rig a few cameras to a remote controlled car, recording images and GPS coordinates as it went along.

The mini Street View car is controlled by a single NXT module that receives commands from a PS2 controller via a PSPNx sensor he purchased. A trio of cameras have been attached to the car, which are meant to take pictures in all different directions when triggered by his remote. A handful of additional motors are also used for driving the car, steering, and for activating the shutter release on the cameras.

The car worked decently during testing, but [Mark] says there is still plenty of room for improvement. He is having issues reliably triggering all cameras at the moment, but we’re sure he’ll have it sorted out soon enough.

Keep reading to see a video of his mini Street View car in action.

[Chris] is quite the devoted tinkerer. He recently wrote in to share what can only be described as a labor of love. His Quad Delta Robot system has been in the works for about six years now, split into periods of research, building, more research, and rebuilding until arriving at its current form.

The system is made up of four Lego NXT robots which are tasked with sorting Lego cubes by color as they come down a pair of conveyer belts. The robots were built to mimic commercially available pick and place robots which can be found on assembly lines all over the world.

Each robot operates independently, receiving signals via a light sensor which tells the robot where the next brick is located, as well as what color it is. This data is sent by the main NXT unit, which uses a lights sensor to determine brick color and position, relaying the information to the other bots via flashing LEDs. All of the robots receive the same signal, but much like NIC cards ignore frames not destined for their MAC, the bots ignore messages that are not addressed to them.

The machine is truly amazing to watch – it’s clear that all of [Chris'] research and planning has paid off. You have to check out the video embedded below to truly appreciate all of the work that went into this system. Also, be sure to swing by his site for a far more in-depth look at how the machines work, it is definitely worth the time.

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.

[via Tinkernology]

[Bshikin] built a pinhole camera out of Lego pieces (translated). It is a fully automated unit thanks to the integration of the NXT pieces. It took a bit of careful calculation to get the film spacing adjusted to match the focal length, and quite a bit of tape was necessary to keep light out of the film chamber. But in the end, it’s an amazing build that takes decent pictures. The software has settings for film size and speed, and takes care of exposing and advancing the frame at the click of a button. See for yourself after the break.

If you hunger for some more camera building goodness check out this SLR hand crafted from scratch.

[Thanks Vasili]

When [Dave] installed hardwood flooring in his house, he needed a solution to help automate the monotonous task of routine sweeping. Rather than go out and buy one of the many existing automated sweep robots out there, he decided to use his passion for LEGO Robotics to design and build a NXT based Swifferbot he calls Pulito. His version implements all the important features such as object avoidance using bump sensors, an IR beacon used to automatically return to the charging station, and a photoresistor to monitor the charge of the battery. [Dave] also includes a nifty LEGO sensor multiplexor, allowing him to save on I/O ports, which is almost worth sharing by itself.

Videos after the break.

Playing store just got really, really fun because you can now build your own LEGO barcode scanner. As you can see after the break, it works well and it’s fast like a real barcode scanner. Unfortunately it doesn’t scan real barcodes. Or at least not traditional ones. As we learned in the Barcode Challenge, standard barcodes are a set of white and black bars that make up the ones and zeros of the code. This system uses the same white and gray bar system but it seems that it’s only the number of bars that identify an item, not a code created by a particular combination of light and dark. The items above are all scannable because the scanner counts the 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 white beams on the bottom of each package. Still, it’s incredibly clever and a great toy for the young hackers to build if they have a little help.

[via Tinkernology]

With 2400 LEGO bricks and a lot of patience, [Will Gorman] built a LEGO 3D printer. It’s similar to a RepRap or a Makerbot, but instead of extruding plastic, it uses pre-extruded building blocks (aka LEGO bricks).  The grey wall extending far above the unit itself is a feed magazine which holds the raw material. A Java application takes an MLCad file and translates it into building instructions for the printer. Those instructions are then sent to the device via USB. See it happen after the break.

Now this just needs to be combined with the LEGO sorting machine for an inexhaustible supply of bricks.

After seeing Toy Story [Will Gorman's] son wanted to play the Crane Game. Rather than hanging out in the lobby of the pizza parlor, [Will] built one at home using Lego. The skill crane as he calls it has a large gantry to travel over the top of the treasure box. The claw can move side to side on the gantry, dropping for a chance at some loot once it’s in the right place. See a successful run in the video after the break and if you can’t help yourself, there’s build instructions that will have you up and running in no time. But you don’t have to build it out of Lego, sometimes you just need some junk to pull one of these together.

[Stewart Allen] acquired a Mindstorm kit about a month ago and he’s already building his own sensors for it. He wanted a more accurate range finder with a narrower measurement field than the stock sensor. Mindstorm has the option to communicate with sensors via an I2C bus. [Stewart] set up an ATtiny45 to act as a the slave on the bus, facilitating the analog measurement of the distance voltage by using and lookup table, and handling the data transfer with the NXT brick. His testing setup is pictured above, with an AVR Dragon for programming the tiny45 and a Bus Pirate for sniffing the I2C data during the development process. The sensor, looking great on a professionally made PCB he ordered, requires a simple driver that [Stewart] hammered out for use with leJOS, the alternative Mindstorm firmware we’ve seen before.

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.

The idea of the Great Ball Contraption is to take modules from many builders and combine them into one large machine. The modules need to find some way of moving LEGO soccer balls and basketballs from an input point to an exit are that passes them onto the next module. Some of them sort the balls, but in the end the eight-and-a-half-minute video above shows the orbs going around and around. That’s just fine with us, it’s no secret that we love machines that are overly complicated and may be completely useless.

Ah, the heady aroma of damp engineers! It’s raining in Silicon Valley, where the 2010 Embedded Systems Conference is getting off the ground at San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center.

ESC is primarily an industry event. In the past there’s been some lighter fare such as Parallax, Inc. representing the hobbyist market and giant robot giraffes walking the expo. With the economy now turned sour, the show floor lately is just a bit smaller and the focus more businesslike. Still, nestled between components intended to sell by the millions and oscilloscopes costing more than some cars, one can still find a few nifty technology products well within the budget of most Hack a Day readers, along with a few good classic hacks and tech demos…

(Is that a promise or a threat?)

First order of business was to follow up on a couple of products we’ve covered in the recent past…

We reviewed NXP’s mbed prototyping platform in November of last year. While there’s no stunning new revision, the good news is that the mbed community is going strong and economies of scale have made it possible to trim the starter kit price from $99 back down to the original early adopter cost of $59.

Additionally, they’ve thrown together a project in just a few days to demonstrate the prototyping ease of the mbed platform. Reading like a checklist of Hack a Day clichés, the demo brings together Twitter, the Logo programming language, live web streaming, servos and an Etch-a-Sketch. You can read more on the mbed blog, or watch the live stream and participate during ESC show hours.

We also liked this little breakout board which adds the most essential interfaces to mbed: MicroSD, Ethernet and USB host & client. This was something quickly made for an mbed workshop, and while there are no plans to officially productize it, we’re told the unpopulated board might be available through SparkFun’s BatchPCB service in the future.

Many readers were put off by the web-centric development approach used by mbed, as well as the lack of a debugger. Another NXP entry-level evaluation product called the LPCXpresso provides an affordable ARM development kit from a more traditional angle.

The $30 LPCXpresso boards are available in Cortex-M0 or -M3 varieties and include an integrated JTAG debugger. The downloadable Windows development environment is based around the Eclipse IDE and GNU toolchain. With headers installed the LPCXpresso is breadboard-friendly and in fact shares the same pinout as mbed, so there’s an existing ecosystem of hardware to work from.

STMicroelectronics’ STM8S-Discovery made a huge impact when we mentioned this $7 kit in November, clearing out distributors in a matter of days. At ESC, ST was showing their new ultra-low-power 8- and 32-bit MCUs with demos powered by a cactus (a variation on the classic lemon battery), a cup of warm water sitting atop a Peltier junction, and a modest induction charger. (What, no wind power?)

A new version on the STM8S-Discovery based on the new lower-power chip should be available within a couple of months, and is expected to be similarly affordable.

(Left: the original STM8S kit that created the ruckus. Right: the forthcoming STM8L kit.)

At the Texas Instruments booth, the BeagleBoard XM was being demonstrated, which improves upon its predecessor in nearly every regard.

We’re told BeagleBoard XM stands for “extra MIPS,” “extra memory,” (and “extra money,” they joked). The XM does not replace the original BeagleBoard, but will be sold alongside it at a premium price of $179 when it ships in June. The XM includes a faster processor (1 GHz), more RAM (512 MB, and a 1GB model may be forthcoming), Ethernet, more USB ports and improved power protection. The NAND flash is gone, replaced by a MicroSD slot on the underside. The new board is slightly larger but retains the same mounting holes, so it may fit as an upgrade into some existing BeagleBoard projects.

Microchip’s iPod/iPhone accessory development boards that we mentioned last month were on display. Unfortunately it appears one must be signed on with Apple’s “Made for iPod” developer program before these kits can even be ordered from Microchip, which really puts a damper on the fun for anyone who might just want to tinker.

Drifting further from product specifics and more into hacks and eye candy…

Product teardowns have become a staple of tech culture. “Zero-day” and live blog teardowns of new products are particularly exciting. ESC’s gone one better, making a show of ripping into a product (if a rather esoteric one) months before its official release: a high-end Zircon AC wire detector built around a Microchip dsPIC and a bevy of e-field sensors. It’s like engineer pr0n!

National Instruments certainly had one of the most entertaining booths at the event. Rather than passively showing dry PowerPoint summaries and monitors running LabVIEW (their graphical programming environment for engineers and scientists), they instead presented physical demos and projects making use of the software. Some serious, others not-so-serious. Hacks!

Remember Waterloo Labs’ iPhone-controlled car hack? There it is! Rather, there it is minus the actual car, but with all the essential parts nicely laid out where we can observe the rig in action. At the other end of the booth, one can challenge “RockBot” to a round of Frets on Fire, not unlike prior hacks we’ve seen.

Hack a Day readers might be familiar with Digi International for their XBee wireless modules, such as used in Adafruit’s Tweet-a-Watt power monitor. Easily distracted by shiny things, we were initially smitten with this addressable LED matrix wrapped around their booth; not a product, just something to catch peoples’ interest:

As it turns out, there’s an added bonus hack behind the hack. Most of Digi’s booth displays could be controlled and monitored using their own custom web apps, so it was a simple matter of walking around with an iPod touch to run the show:

At the ARM pavilion, this “Speedcuber” was solving Rubik’s cubes in under half a minute. The camera and puzzle-solving logic comes from a Motorola Droid. Commands are issued over Bluetooth to a pair of LEGO Mindstorms NXT controllers to drive the motors that manipulate the cube.

Macraigor Systems produces a line of JTAG debuggers…but to be honest, we (and pretty much everyone else passing the booth) nearly missed that fact, as we were all so distracted by their demo application involving one spectacular and elegant Intel hexapod robot:

We similarly fanboyed over Cryptography Research’s German Enigma cipher machine, as it was our first time seeing one not under lock and key in a glass museum case:

ESC Silicon Valley runs through Thursday, April 29th, and last we checked one could still register for a free exhibits-only pass on the ESC web site.