Official NXTasy Challenge No. 2

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Well, most of you wanted another builiding contest in the poll I’ve posted (those who bothered voting at least..) so I’ve changed the plans and we’ll get going!

Challenge No. 2 - “Move the Ball!”

Preliminary instructions (more detailed rules will be posted soon):
1. Robot should be built from a SINGLE RETAIL NXT SET parts. If you’re unsure what this means look here: http://www.peeron.com/inv/sets/8527-1. You can, however, use the LEGO Lithium Ion battery to power your robot.

2. A plastic ball (red or blue) should be placed on a mount (a starting point can be the mount in the TriBot building instructions, but anything else is ok as long as its part are from the same NXT set as the robot itself) and located ANYWHERE inside the oval circle of the NXT Test Pad. The position must NOT be defined a priori to the program!

3. The robot should start anywhere OUTSIDE the oval circle (i.e. looking from the above no part of it should be in or above the line). The starting position CAN be defined a priori if you like.

4. About 10 seconds after the user starts the program, the robot should initiate a timer and begin it’s mission. When the mission is complete it should beep and display the timer value on the screen. A picture showing clearly this result should accompany the video record of the whole operation.

5. When the robot starts it should seek and find the ball, catch it (in whatever way you like!), move outside of the oval circle, make two full turns around the oval following the black line (using line-following, not dead-reckoning!), then put the ball back on it’s mount and get out of the oval circle. Simple, isn’t it?

6. Inside the oval you must not put or draw anything except for the ball and the mount. Furthermore, you should not direct the robot to the ball in any way - it must find it by its own sensors. Outside the oval you can put/built/draw anything you like, as long as it is not part of the robot. For these “supporting” structures you can use anything you like, including non-LEGO parts and active stuff (lamps, lasers or whatever your wild imagination takes you!)

7. A video and a picture of the timer result should be emailed to guy@nxtasy.org as well as any question/comment etc.

PRIZES will be announced in a later post

DEADLINE is May 1st 2007

A topic dedicated for discussion regarding this challenge is here.

Good Luck!

Posted in news | 16 Comments »

Sensor Building Kit for NXT with PCF8574 IC

Wednesday, March 14th, 2007

Here’s a new product from mindsensors.com. This kit is an ideal platform for you to design and build your own sensor. The kit comes with all the necessary parts to do Input/Outputs with NXT brick.

The kit contains:

• PCB
• PCF8574 IC
• appropriate capacitors
• appropriate resistors
• NXT type socket
• 10 pin header

Note: requires soldering.

Posted in hardware, news | 2 Comments »