#lego robotics

[omni-scient-pan-da]

I was thinking about the butterfly effect and realized... Yeah

[myothertardisisonthemun]

I need to get back into teaching kids Lego robotics.

The robot uprising is not coming fast enough

[savagebeastrecords]

Lego robot built by HS student solves Rubik’s Cube in record time!

[thisisntthegeorgeyourelookingfor]

You, well I can’t hear them very well, but they’re saying they made a race car with a motion sensor that stops it if anything is in front of it.

[deerholdfurb]

Distant Family

[msbrickkitten]

Rebuilding Stabby... Part??

Ah, new blog for my Lego Stuff. Figured I’d separate Lego stuff from my general all purpose chaos blog.

Soooooo.... Bricklink Haul today with LOTS of components to rebuild Stabby!

Technic Lift arm beams in many different sizes and shapes! I had completed Stabby, you can see the neck/head gimbal and Stabby’s face in the background, but, when I took him to work, and then to the local Lego Store, Several performance issues arose and I found he was very slow to move on hard floors.

He was also VERY unbalanced and top/front heavy...

Part of the reason for being top/front heavy is the angle of the tracks, and, yes, the GoPro Session in the neck/head gimbal.

I’ve also upgraded from the LOS IR sensors to an SBrick, so, the GoPro allows me to run Stabby around without having to directly watch him. (I’ve also got a GREAT video of one of my engineers dancing for him and talking to him like a puppy!)

So, complete redesign to make him run on hard floors better, and faster, and so, a LARGE Bricklink order for the pieces to do so. :)

More Updates as I get to work on him!

[carolynboucharddesign]

I created these posters with my friend, a software engineer at Google, to help teach Lego robotics to 6th graders. He volunteers through a Google program that teaches underprivileged children in New York programming. The best thing about this project for me was getting together with my friend and having him describe how Lego Mindstorms works. It took about an hour for me to get it (not that I'm an expert or understand all the ins and outs by any means), and the differences between how my very math-centric friend would describe how it works, and the way I understood it, was super interesting.

I was surprised at how poor the user interface is on the program. Much of it is tiny and confusing, with icons that are difficult to see, look way too similar to each other, and don't make sense without a computer science background. After having it described to me, I do understand why the choices were made to do things the way they are, but it would be a little confusing to me to keep it straight (and I'm not an underprivileged 12 year old!) I was also very surprised that there were no vector icons that I could find, and so I recreated the ones on the poster (which I actually enjoyed doing.)

[tales-from-the-library]

Tales From the Library

May 24th 2016-

Today at the library was out very first "Lego Robotics" club!

Where kids built an alligator of of Legos, and then could program it to open and shut its mouth!

At the end, we passed out a survey and one of the questions was "what other kinds of programs would you like?"

One kid shouted "penguins!!! Just penguins. Nothing else!"

Another girl said "a petting zoo- but with only giraffes!!!"

Like oh man, I wish these kids were in charge of the world.