Projects
A record of our projects: science, tech, Lego, programming, etc.
February 20, 2012
Video: A Working Lego Machine Gun
Alex made this machine gun out of Legos from the directions on nxtprograms.com.
February 18, 2012
Video: Sumo Bot Competition #1
February 6, 2012
A Ball-shooter-ramp-thingy.
January 30, 2012
Alex made a dragster from directions on nxtprograms.com.
January 16, 2012
Alex made the Lego "Alpha Rex" over the course of a couple of days, mostly by himself.
January 5, 2012
January 2, 2012
Video: A simple line-following robot, using the Lego NXT color and light sensor and a simple pure proportional control algorithm that is calibrated automatically to the current light levels at program start-up. The robot spins once to find the lightest and darkest value and sets the set-point in the middle of the lightest and darkest value. It also calculates the "gain" before starting. Then it will follow the left part of the line. If a bend is too sharp, it can overshoot the line and spin around and may not regain the line -- or it may regain the line going in the other direction. I plan to fix this by adding an integral term to the control algorithm, with some integrator rate limiting logic, and also allow the wheels to turn backwards for really sharp turns in the line.
December 31, 2011
A catapult we built from directions at nxtprograms.com. It looks a bit different because we have the NXT 2.0 (+ some other Legos), the directions are for the 1.0 version, and the sets are not quite the same.
December 3, 2011
Video: Pneumatic Tilt Maze
Video: Penny Battery
October 30, 2011
Video of our home-made Leyden Jar
October 28, 2011
Video of our "Lego Paper Crinkler", aka "The Lego Paper Mangler". Alex absolutely loves this contraption. Plays with it in the morning before going to school.
October 22, 2011
An authentic Shuttle heat-shield tile. It was very light. It felt fragile and there was tiny granules (silicon?) coming off of it as one handled it. This was another treat. More photos from this day are at Todd's Space Page.
A picture in the deactivated OV-95, in building 16 at JSC, the test "shuttle" that was used for avionics hardware and software testing. Before it flew on a flight shuttle, it was "flown" here first. Here is Alex aft of the payload bay bulkhead (i.e., aft of the payload bay). I think this is where the main engines and APUs (among other equipment) are on a flight shuttle. More photos from this day are at Todd's Space Page.
September 5, 2011
Video: Paper clips, fruit, a PicoBoard, and Scratch
July 29, 2011
Video: Lego Spider.
July 27, 2011
Video: The Noogie Machine
July 18, 2011
Video: Reversing Lego Car.
Click on the cat and then use the arrow keys and the space bar to draw.
Alex loves playing with Scratch. This is the super-simple code needed for the above program. This isn't one of his programs, but I may post some of his programs in the future.
