hi all!..i was unsure where to post this topic so my appologies. I have this RIS 2.0 from lego group and it is an amazing "toy" to play with and also to learn due to it invloves or take advantage of the easy language to learn that let you program the robot or whatever invention you want to create. I have seen some very amazing and i have to admit that this lego is just a beggining in the programming world so i get shocked when i see such huge inventions with such an easy language model. Do you have one? what have you built?

I think this topic suits the computer section more. But anyway, yeah! Those things are really cool. I used to dream about them when i was young, hoping that my dad would get me one for christmas or during my birthday, but unfortunately that didn't happen. Instead I got a computer, which was better i guess.

unfortunately i didnt have one , but a friend of mine did. he built a cable car system with his. this was basically a piece of supporting wire from one end of his bedroom to the other. the cable traversed along the wire until it reached the end of the wire , which then activated a limit switch , this then reversed the direction of the drive motor and the cable car then traversed back along the cable. the same happened at the other end of the cable. it looked fantastic and was something that you couldnt find in the shops , it was something very individual.

Two years back i was on a fll (First Lego Leage) team. There are some insane designed for those out there. the robotics invintion system software, is very basic. If you are really wanting to get into to it there is a version of much more powerful software called, RoboLab. It is just about the same thing but much more costimizable and a much more powerful program...

fll website

Lucias O`Neil

Woah! I thought i'll never find a topic like this. I love robotics too, in fact i program AI for robotics and burn them on PIC's.

Although im not into Lego, i hand craft them myself.

http://geocities.com/amawclan/robot.jpg

This is my newest robotic arm. My old one is using aluminum body but looks uncool, so i tried using plastic (acrylic plastics used for signage). A lighter for bending the plastics, mini drill, sand papers to smoothen the edges and just a few more tools.

I also used servo motors for movement, since they are very easy to connect on IC's then you'll have no problems.

Programming the PIC's are no problem too. At first i was using Assembly Language but gave me a headache, then shifted to PICbasic but i wasn't satisfied so finally i found mikroBASIC by mikroelectronika which is far more better. Uses a structed programming scheme, unlike the linear basics.

Search for Servos, PIC (Programmable ICs), PCBS, and PICbasic so you could start your robotics dream! Its easy, just a little passion.

Back in the day, when I was doing my engineering degree, we had a bunch of projects like this. They had lego sets that included sensors, motors, key pads, etc. which we hooked up to a motorola processor. You had to program the processor in assembly to control all the stuff. It was pretty fun.

One project I had was a car that was controlled via remote and had sensors so it could run by itself. We built a maze and dropped it in and it could navigate the maze by itself.

The other project was a robotic arm placed on top of our already existing car. The car navigated an obsticle course and had to pick up ping pong balls along the way. The ping pong balls had to be dropped into a container. The arm also had to recognize the difference between ping pong ball and golf balls.

Pretty fun but lots of work.