Paint your easter eggs with the NXT

Easter is at hand, and in time MCP Mike Brandl from Austria has adapted his 2008's christmas bauble painter to use it for painting easter eggs:



At the bottom of the assiocated web page, you can find a LDraw file that can be used as building instructions as well as the archived NXT-G program (including the required MyBlocks and a small ReadMe for usage).

Go for it and show us your best easter eggs you have created with it!

Odin Scout

An amazing build with a unique method of changing direction. The action begins 90 seconds into the video.

NXT Transmission

Although I've been really busy with FTC ever since the competition got underway, I've still found some time here and there to work on NXT projects. One concept I've always been interested in is the idea of making a certain number of motors able to drive a larger number of mechanisms, one at a time. So I put together a simple transmission design, in which two motors can drive each of four axles, one at a time. The first motor turns a gear which can drive gears on each of four axles. The second motor drives a rack-and-pinion system to move the first motor to across the four axles. The user can press the left and right arrow keys to switch from driving one axle to the next.

Here you can see the four axles with black gears on them, and the grey gear on the motor which drives them.

Here you can see the rack-and-pinion mechanism for moving the first motor across the four axles.

You can see a video of the robot in action below:

Although it would probably make a robot more complicated, something like this could be useful in FLL, where you're limited to three motors, since it could enable you to have more mechanisms on the robot at the same time.

-Jonathan

NXT Using iPhone Accelerometer

The on-board camera makes for a fun video. More details here.