THE BEGINNING

This is the beginning of a documentation about LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT projects. We are three people who actually look for solving challenging NXT issues. One of the major criteria for us is to built and code things together. Basically that is the reason why we started this blog.

Our first idea is the ball harvesting project which has the following requirements:

- The overall task should be split into 3 subprojects. The subprojects should be more or less autarkic. This would fit the fact that we come up with our own LEGO kit each.

- Overall project scope: The aim is to built a cycle of collecting, carrying, sorting and redistributing table tennis balls. To solve this task the following aspects need to be considered: autonomous ball collection within a defined area, handover of the balls, vehicle movement following the “follow the line” procedure, ball sorting and ball shooting.The project mainly consist of four pieces:

1. Table tennis balls: the aim is to collect, carry, sort and redistribute them.

2. Ball harvester: Autonomous collecting of the table tennis balls within a defined harvesting area.

3. Lorry: Gathering the balls from the harvester and carry them to the factory by following a line.

4. Factory: Gathering the balls from the lorry, do some sorting procedures, carry them towards a ball canon and shoot the balls back into the harvesting area.

- Later on the project could be modified to gain a higher complexity level, e.g. the harvester and the lorry could communicate via Bluetooth when the handover needs to take place,

- Hardware:

1. 1x LEGO Mindstorms JVM RCX Brick Kit

2. 2x LEGO Mindtsorms JVM NXT Brick Kit

3. 1x LEGO Mindtsorms JVM NXT 2.0 Brick Kit

4. Additional LEGO parts

5. Ramps

6. Tape

- Software: LEJOS Java for LEGO Mindstorms: http://lejos.sourceforge.net/

The test preparation can be found below.

The brainstorming: