Curiosity Landed, Here’s The LEGO Version

August 6, 2012 by 10 Comments

The Mars Science Laboratory hasn’t had her wheels down for a day and already the Curiosity-inspired builds are rolling in. [Will] and [Doug] built a LEGO model of the Curiosity rover for the Build the Future in Space event at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Everything on this scaled-down version of Curiosity is completely made out of LEGO, including the four powered wheels, motorized mast, and articulated, controllable arm.

The LEGO rover contains 7 NTX bricks, 13 motors, two power function motors, and over 1000 pieces of LEGO held together without any glue. The rover is under remote control from two operators. The driver controls the rotation and direction of the four powered corner wheels, while another operator uses a Waldo-like manipulator built out of LEGO to move Curiosity‘s mast and arm. Each of these controls communicate with the rover over a Bluetooth connection.

We’ve been wondering when we would see a Curiosity-inspired rocker bogie bot, and we’re pleased as punch the first one just happened to be a LEGO build. Having [Will] and [Doug] time their submission to the Curiosity’s landing on Mars is the icing on the cake.

You can see the LEGO Curiosity in action after the break.

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Lego For Girls? [Limor] Has Some Ideas.

May 25, 2012 by 48 Comments

When Lego announced that they were going to do a series of “Lego for girls”, many of us didn’t get it. When we were kids(get off my lawn!), legos were completely asexual. At least, that’s how my mind saw them, being a caucasian male. While the idea itself makes sense in marketing terms, the products they rolled out were stuck firmly in the same old gender roles. Pink abounds and flowers are prevalent. There’s nothing wrong with little girls being into those things, but it is sad when that is the only option ever presented. To attempt a parallel, I’m not into sports, and I can tell you that the availability of scientific role models kept me sane through many tough periods of life.

[Limor], who you may recognize as the brains behind Adafruit has proposed the set you see above which puts another option out there. They’ve entered the set into the Lego Cuusoo site, where it could become a real product if it earns enough votes. Here is another nice idea for female lego sets being proposed, that shows females in realistic roles such as a chemist and archaeologist .  I’m kind of surprised that I don’t see [Amelia Earhart] or [Ada Lovelace] herself anywhere in the list.

Gender roles aside, who is going to build the ultimate [Nikola Tesla] kit for us?

Time Twister Is An Ingenious Lego Clock

November 2, 2011 by 33 Comments

Here’s an interesting take on a Lego clock, it uses rotating squares to change the orientation of the black and white tiles to display the needed number. As we see one of the digits cycling to the next number in the video after the break, a couple of different things pop into mind. This seems very much like a 1-dimensional Rubik’s Cube, and it also has a hint of a very large ePaper display. Those use magnetic fields to swivel microspheres that are black on one side and white on the other.

The timepiece, which was built by [Hans Andersson], is limited to displaying numbers only. If you think about it, each row is three pixels but you don’t need to have every combination of those pixels available in order to display the digits. Four sides provide enough room for the necessary combinations. This would not be true if you were trying to scale it up to include all alpha-numeric characters.

The tick of this thing certainly sounds interesting, huh?

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Genetic Testing With Lego

October 11, 2011 by 7 Comments

From the dark recesses of the Internet circa 2009 comes the BioBrick-A-Bot, a liquid handling system for molecular biologists.

The 2009 iGEM competition was a student competition to build devices for synthetic biology. The BioBrick-A-Bot’s goal is to build a simple, low-cost liquid handling system that sucks liquids out of petri dishes and into vials.

Like most lab equipment, the commercial version of this tech is insanely expensive – about 10 grand for a commercial liquid handling robot. The BioBrick-A-Bot is made nearly entirely out of LEGO parts, so the cost of the entire system was brought down to about $700.

There are two main parts to the BioBrick-A-Bot. The Alpha module holds four pipette on a delta platform We’ve seen this type of robot built out of LEGO before, but moving liquids is new territory. The Phi module contains all the mechanics to suck microliters of liquid into a pipette and spit them out into vials.

The BioBrick-A-Bot didn’t win the 2009 iGEM competition (that honor was taken by students from Heidelberg Cambridge), but we’d take a LEGO robot any day of the week. Check out the demo after the break.

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Turning Pixels Into LEGO Pieces

September 8, 2011 by 16 Comments

Looking to spice up his living room with some modular plastic pieces, [Quentin] came up with a way to take digital pixels and convert them to LEGO building plans. The end result is a coffee table top that uses a font complete with anti-aliasing.

The first thing he did was figure out physical dimension and color palettes available from the popular building blocks. His search yielded all of the answers after he spent some time on Brickipedia. Armed with that knowledge he started bargain hunting, settling on a brick size that yielded adequate resolution without breaking the bank (he budgeted 87 Euros or about $125 for materials). From there he used Photoshop, along with a custom color palate that matches the LEGO colors, to generate the design. Image in hand, he finished the planning stage by writing a program to count the pixels, convert them into LEGO bricks, and spit out an order list and build instructions. He’s saving others the trouble of doing the same by releasing his source code.

Of course the project wouldn’t be nearly as fun if he hadn’t made a fast-time build video. We’ve embedded it after the break.

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A Plotter Made From Lego Parts

July 6, 2011 by 9 Comments

We’re always amazed at what people can come up with using Lego parts, but this hack certainly pushes the limits. Originally conceived as a 3D printer, this plotter is still an impressive proof-of-concept. Ironically, this “3D printer” was build with the hope of winning a Makerbot 3D printer, so be sure to vote for it if you’re impressed.

it’s pretty impressive seeing what [graphmastur] has done using only Lego parts. It’s especially entertaining to see a sheet of Lego “grass” used as the Y-axis table. The build was designed in Lego Digital designer, and the parts are available in “LDD” format or HTML.

This project is explained further in the video after the break. If you’d like to simply see it do a plotting operation, fast forward to around 4:30. The device is not perfect, but as the video says “it worked, pretty well” when drawing a square with an ordinary marker. Continue reading “A Plotter Made From Lego Parts” →

Amazing Quad Pick And Place System Tirelessly Sorts Your Legos

April 20, 2011 by 19 Comments

delta_robots

[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.

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