Archive for April, 2008

2008 FIRST LEGO League World Festival

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

The recent 2008 FIRST LEGO League World Festival has brought a flurry of postings and pictures on the news section of the MINDSTORMS website. How many teams participated, you say? The April 21 post mentions, “Eighty one teams from around the world participated in the 10th FIRST LEGO League (FLL) World Festival this past weekend at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.” Below is just one of the pictures, which shows a winning robot that landed the “Green Man Group” first place in the Robot Performance Award.

Make sure you check it out!

Green Man Robot

Posted in Events, Inventions | 4 Comments »

Robot Power Video

Thursday, April 17th, 2008

I’ve mentioned a particularly funny NXT movie to more than one person over the past couple of months. While this movie has been around for a little while, it’s worth bringing up again. So here’s the link:

 http://5x5m.com/files/mindstorms/

Enjoy…

Posted in Video | 1 Comment »

Book Signing in Austin, Texas Next Week!

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

As mentioned in a previous posting, I’m having a book signing at a Barnes & Noble in Austin, Texas on Saturday April 19th. The signing starts at 2PM.

Although previously I mentioned bringing two robots from The Inventor’s Guide with me, I’m now planning on bringing one robot from the book—Tag-Bot—and one from the NXT set: Spike the walking scorpion. The robots will be sitting on a table for the duration of the event, and Spike plays that role quite well. Tag-Bot, on the other hand, is supposed to run around like crazy. In any case, the two bots should give people who are unfamiliar with MINDSTORMS an idea of what they can create with the NXT set.

Hope to see you there!

Barnes & Noble

Posted in Events, The ULMN Inventor's Guide Updates | 1 Comment »

Results of Biped Building Challenge

Monday, April 7th, 2008

Earlier I blogged about the official Biped Building Challenge, and just recently the winners were announced here on the MINDSTORMS website. The winners are as follows:

Champion’s Award: “Bipedal Dragon Prototype” by billy259.

Robot Design Award: “NeXTBIRD (or MODEL 05)” by NeXTSTORM

Robot Performance Award: “Little Bigfoot” (shown below) by Mister.Tux

Creative Use of NXTLOG Award: “The helpi’vefallenandican’tgetup! biped” by jayko543

Congratulations to the winners and all the robots that received an honorable mention!

Little Bigfoot

Posted in Events, Inventions | 1 Comment »

NXTLOG 2.0 Upgrade—now with Video!

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

The official MINDSTORMS website has upgraded NXTLOG to version 2.0. You can read the announcement here. One of the main improvements is that users can now upload video of their robots. Previously, there was no way to include video, and I’m glad to see that this has been resolved. Check out the new NXTLOG here and start uploading some of your creations!

NXTLOG_2.0

Posted in Inventions, Video | 1 Comment »