To terrorize and Annoy!!!

Yesterday my Pooks *(who is a wonderful woman) gave me my early birthday present. A new Lego Mindstorms NXT Robotics Set!!! We did not have batteries at first so I spent time working on robots with no brains and getting familiar with a newer set of lego blocks for making robotics & technical construction. I finally got it working yesterday and installed the software on my (new) mac mini and wrote a simple program to move the robot around the living room. Mainly like the old Logo programming I did in HighSchool, move forward 20, say "Lego", move forward 20, say "Lego", repeat three times :-).

It was cooking with gas!! you can make it "say" things through a built-in speaker. It has touch, light, sound and distance sensors. It keeps track of distances traveled by the wheels so that you can accurately program it for certain actions. I ended up having to jack up the end of it a little to make sure my robot could make it over the carpet terrain of the living room. The software that comes with it allows for some cool branching and programming statements. I'm no where close to a walking robot yet, but I like the rolling one I've got now. Here it is... My First Robot!



My work will be done with the robot once it can chase the cats around the house effectively!! :-)