Project of the week: Duke, an NXT Dog

Check out this cool dog created by MySnailEatsPizza. "This robotic dog can sit, beg, walk (not well), wag his tail, bark, sniff, howl, hear, feel, and see". To see more about this project click here. Do you like it? Comment below!.

Building Tip: Working with Gears

Gears are essential part of robots and machines. I've seen many brilliant NXT projects that don't work well because of the gears. When we're working with gears, we need to ask us: what do I need, torque or speed?. If you're making a race car you need speed, but if you're making a heavy truck that can transport a lot of heavy stuff you need torque. We can achieve that playing with the sizes of the gears. If you conect a big gear with a small one, every time that the big gear rotates 360° the small will rotate a lot more, so it will be spinning faster (but will less torque). Look this:

The wheel is spinning much faster than the motor, but with less torque

The contrary case:

The wheel is spinning with less speed than the motor, but with more torque

Remember the heavy truck? Well this super slow truck should look like this inside:

Super slow and lot of torque

What if you need torque and speed? Well, you need a transmission box, like in a real car. When you are in first gear you have a lot of torque, in the second one you have more speed but less torque and so on... A transmission box changes the position of the gears to transmit with speed or torque.
Hey! I know that you wanna build a transmission box right now! Here are some great examples of transmissions box built with Lego Mindstorms.

Lego Engine

Check this awesome lego V8 Engine (1440 rmp)

Tutorial: first steps in programming, 2-First Lines [NXC]

Este tutorial también está disponible en español. Haz clic aquí para verlo.

This is the second part of a serie of tutorials called "First steps in programming". These tutorials are for people who has never programmed and people who has programmed and want to know how to do it in Lego Mindstorms NXT. We are going to be programming in NXC (Not eXactly C). This is a C-like programming language that has some great features and it's easy to learn, so don't be afraid!. I'm going to explain everything, so if you know C please have a little patience.
If you want to see the first tutorial "Installing the software" click here.

Tutorial: first steps in programming, 1-Installing the software [NXC]

Este tutorial también está disponible en español. Haz clic aquí para verlo.

This is the first part of a serie of tutorials that I'm going to be posting called "First steps in programming". These tutorials are for people who has never programmed and people who has programmed and want to know how to do it in Lego Mindstorms NXT. We are going to be programming in NXC (Not eXactly C). This is a C-like programming language that has some great features and it's easy to learn, so don't be afraid!. I'm going to explain everything, so if you know C please have a little patience. This first tutorial is an easy and quick one because is only for installing the neccesary software.

Project of the Week: The Interactive humanoid

Alright, this is the dream of every lego builder. This robot's name is Bob and was built by shutinc who post it in lego nxt log. I choose this project because it show us that with creativity and hard work (and a lot of pieces!) you can do anything with lego. I know, you probably don't have enough pieces to build just one arm, but that gives you more challenge eh?. I will post some tips to build robots with a few pieces. Wait for them.

If you want to see more pictures and know more about Bob, go to his project page in nxt log.