Positioning your MINDSTORM robot precisely on the FIRST LEGO League competition field is one of the first things you should learn while preparing. In this video tutorial, we will show three different attachments you could use when aligning to the walls of the competition table. We will show other ways and attachments in some of the next videos.
In this video we are showing how to use two light sensors to do basic aligning on a black line. This is always needed at the competitions. We also show an example for following a line with two sensors.
In this video we are solving one of the most important challenges on the FIRST LEGO League competition, i.e how to cover your Mindstorms NXT light sensors so that they are not affected by outer light sources at the day of the competition. Once again you would find 3 solutions and more will come in the next videos.
To win the FLL robotics competition you should surely use light sensors for navigating on the field. But the performance of the light sensors is affected by the surrounding light which means you might get different results on the training and on the competition table. This is where calibration is useful. In this video I will show you an easy way to do calibration along with a few examples.
A human being walks with an average speed of about 5 km/h (3 miles/h). In this video tutorial we will develop a block for LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, that measures the speed of the robot in distance/time units where time will be configurable and could be 1 second or 0.5 seconds or any other number of seconds you pass as a param to the block. Measuring the speed of the robot is very powerful if you start building an Artificial Inteligence for your robot and is quite fun :)
If you look at the properties of the move block and the motor block LEGO Mindstorms NXT, you will see that they have much in common. Still they have several differences. You should be aware of these differences in order to choose the appropriate block for your needs.
In episode 11 we looked at one of the most important topics for the competition - calibrating the light sensors. In this video I would like to show you how to use a more programmatic approach. This means letting the robot do the calibration on its own. Automatically.
In this episode I will show you how to program the touch sensor part of the LEGO Mindstorms education robotics sets. I have given answers to questions like - how the touch sensor works or how you can use it.
An interesting question that has arise is whether we can use the LEGO Mindstorms EV3-G Software to program the NXT brick. In this episode we will go through the blocks from the EV3-G Software and see which works with the NXT Hardware and which does not.
An advanced but understandable description of how to program the mindstorm robot to move in a regular n-gon like pentagon, hexagon etc. (Yes, we know math). We have also included notes on the used formulas. A must see for each of you who would like to master the robot movements.
The last thing you want to lose during every robotics competition is time for changing the programs on the brick. This could require seconds and as we all know every second counts. There are a few ways to improve the way of choosing programs. In this video lesson we will show you how to program a menu directly in your program.
In this video lesson, we will show you how to build a menu as a MyBlock in LEGO Mindstorms NXG-G. Having a menu is a must at robotics competitions since it saves time and gives easy access to program functionalities.
In this episode of the Basic NXT Programming series I will cover the sound sensor. I will explain how to program the sound sensor, stop on common problems faced, when the sound sensor is used and finally we will build a program that will allow us to control the robot's speed through the volume of the sound.
In this tutorial, I will cover the adjustments of the display and the color lamp blocks from the LEGO Mindstorms NXT-G. Today I will show you how to use the color lamp in order to make your robot more interesting or how to display sensors values or try to draw something on the screen of the brick.
The scorpion is one of the most famous robots build with the NXT kit. In this lesson we are showing how to use the rotation sensor to program the scorpion and its strikes. The main challenge is how to return the spike for the same amount of degrees after it strikes. The other topic is how to use variable to keep the state of the scorpion. Both of this techniques are very valuable during the competition.
In this video I am building the five minute robot from LEGO Mindstorms and I am doing a short introduction on how to make the robot move forward and turn around. Throught this series I will be using mostly NXT-G as a programming environment.
During the FIRST LEGO League competition you can hardly use the sound block, because of the noise from the excitement around the tables, but it has a few interesting applications. I this video lesson I will show you how to use the sound block and build a program that makes the robot say which color it sees.
In this lesson we build a simple LEGO Mindstorms NXT calculator program that sums, multiplies, subsctracts or divides two numbers between 1 and 50.
We are showing the basics of communication between LEGO Mindstorms NXT Bricks using a Bluetooth connection. In the next few minutes we will build two programs - one for the master and one for the slave brick, while explaining the essentials for building such programs.