Friday, December 11, 2009
WORKSHOP #2
Furthermore we worked on the ball sorter. Firstly we built a prototype of a ball separation mechanism. This part is based on the RCX brick technology.
Last but not least we continued prototyping the lorry. Right now we should have a chassis that should work out well if improved a bit more.
Please find the workshop video below. The NXT code can be found on HUMYO.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
WORKSHOP #1
Monday, November 16, 2009
WILL THIS WORK?
I built the Harvester to capture a minimum of 6 balls. Right now I’m preparing the test code. Dropping the balls should work very well since I could prove the mechanism manually.
I’ll keep you updated on the results.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
BALL HARVESTER MECHANISM
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
BALL HARVESTER
Hardware configuration:
- 2x motors used as driving engines
- 1x motor powering the hook
- 1x light sensor to detect the harvesting area border
- 1x light sensor to detect and count the harvested balls
- Tbd: one more sensor to offload the balls
Monday, November 2, 2009
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: