The Queboid shooter

Remember Mark Crosbie's great Queboid?
He has published building instructions now for a shooter version of it (below, there's a video of the Queboid shooter in action at WRO).
That's certainly one of the robots I am going to rebuild during Christmas holidays.

NXT 2.0 Ball Shooter, Baseball Game

The NXT 2.0 kit comes with parts to make a ball shooter ("Zamor Sphere Launcher"), but it is not exactly obvious how to build a simple one that is controlled by the NXT, and the shooter on the built-in ShooterBot robot is somewhat strange and hard to transfer to another robot. So I have posted a design for a compact and sturdy Ball Shooter that is easy to attach to another robot:

Then I used this shooter as part of this new Baseball Game for NXT 2.0:

Images from BrickCon 2009

Steve Putz, editor of the Robotics Learning web site, has posted some photos from the BrickCon 2009 which took place lately in Seattle (Or., USA).
There's also a video showing his walking NXT shooter that made second place in the Walking Robot Competition there (as far as I know, the winner was Gus Jansson's NXT hexapod we reported about one week ago).

If anyone has other infos and pictures or videos from that event, please post the links in the comments.

Wires ShooterBot NXT 2.0

Dear MINDSTORMS fans,

Although LEGO did their very best to check and double check the instructions, this somehow slipped through. A small error in one of the printed materials was discovered after the new NXT 2.0 box (8547) was packed and shipped.

As you can see in the below picture, form the LEGO MINDSTORMS User Guide (page15), two of the connections wires for the two drive motors from the starter model “ShooterBot” are misplaced. Although you can easily switch the wires it does not seem as an obvious error for those who are new to MINDSTORMS, resulting in strange behavior on their starter robot.

WRONG connection wires in ShooterBot BI

The software that also holds all the building and programming instructions have the wires in the correct order. Some of the older MINDSTORMS fans will remember that always the port B and C are used to power skid steer driving or walking, this is because they share the same motor driver IC and therefore they stay better synchronized.

CORRECT connection wires in ShooterBot BI


Martyn

An attempt on a LEGO® MINDSTORMS Gatling Gun

Some time ago, I got hold on a couple of the Technic Competition Cannons and pondered about a usage of them in a model. As I always had plans to try for a LEGO® Gatling Gun, I decided to make an attempt on it:


What do you think about it?