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So I was walking through Toys ‘R Us yesterday and saw the new Lego MINDSTORMS.  I already have the last Mindstorms set, but this one is new… and how can I resist new robots?

The best new feature is definitely the “Ultra Sonic” sensor.  It allows the robot to judge depth and see motion.  It’s way better when your robot can see how far it is from the wall rather than having to bump into it before it knows it is there.

If you enjoy spending many many hours trying to accomplish a small task (like me), then you’ll enjoy this.  Even though you are somewhat limited with the sensors you have, you can still do some very cool stuff.

So when I got my set, I built the basic robot.  This took a few hours.  The basic robot allows you to put a ball in front of it and it drives straight at it and then picks it up with its claws when it gets to the ball.  That was neat for about 10 minutes.

I then decided I needed to try and do something myself so I thought, how hard could it be to modify the robot to make it locate the ball first and then go and pick it up.  Well… about 6 hours later… I finally got it to do this.  Going through an excercise like this shows the complexity of robots and gives you a lot of respect for the guys who make robots that actually do useful things.

Anyways… here is what my robot ended up looking like.  The design was only slightly modified from the one in the instructions, but the program I wrote was completely different.

More robots to come…

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