My New Lego Mindstorms NXT!!!

I've always been a big fan of robots. When I was a small kid, I used to watch Transformers. Those were the good times.

Then, It kinda died. I still had that robot anxiety on my brain, but It was surpassed by digital cameras, and computer processors, faster printers, video converters, edition programs, videogames and music. But about 2 weeks ago, you may remember my post about those 3 little robots, Swashbot1, Swashbot2, and Swashbot3. That awakened my dormant inner engineer, and the little bugger started to bite me in the head, giving me a terrible itch. For the past few weeks I'd been thinking about robots and stuff. I even looked up even more robot videos in YouTube, but it was not enough. So I resigned myself to wait for the robotic itch to pass by, as did the model airplane itch, and the airsoft itch.

But today, my boss called me into his office. He didn't even bother calling me himself, he sent a colleague for me. I expected the worse. I began making excuses for not being able to finish the edition on time ("It won't render correctly" o perhaps "I don´t have the plug-ins. I'm downloading them right this moment") To my surprise, he pulled a box from under his desk: Read, it review, build something, take some pictures, and afterwards, you can keep it...

I took the box to my office....er, room, and opened the mystery package. I must admit, I expected a Sony Alpha 700, or something more normal.

The package containde a Lego Mindstorms NXT consumer version set. For many people, this must be a child's toy, but for me, it meant building my own little lego Swashbots... and that my friends, means a lot to a frustrated Han Solo like me...

The Mindstorms NXT is amazing. It has an Ultrasonic Sensor, a Sound sensor, touch sensor, and light sensor. The NXT (the brain of your soon-to-be robot) has Bluetooth capabilities and takes input from the aforementioned sensors through 4 RJ12 cords (Note: this may look similar to standard phone chords, but keep in mind, phone cords are RJ11 cords, which means it has 11, as opposed to the 12 wires in the RJ12. Quick and easy: phones and NXT don't mix!) It also features a nice 100x64 pixel LCD display (greyscale though; One'd guess they did spare on expenses). The NXT is fed by 6 AA batteries. I'd have preferred a rechargeable battery pack, probably Li-Ion, but that's included in the educational version (quoting Wayne Campbell: It will be mine, oh yes, it will be mine!)

The kit includes a software where you can program your robot to do more complicated tasks than the ones programmable on the NXT's screen.

Up until now, I've only been able to make the servos move some wheels, basically, because I lack the time to do anything else. But soon I will post photographs of my ongoing project with my newest tech-toy.

Lesson 3.3 is almost here, also!!! Keep online!!


Lego Mindstorms NXT