Book Review: The Da Vinci Inventions Book

Monday, July 16th, 2007

A few days ago I rechived a review copy of the new APRESS book ‘Advanced NXT: The Da Vinci Inventions Book’ by Matthias Paul Scholz. After a few days, I finally managed to read through the whole thing (but didn’t build any of it’s designs, for reasons explained below).
Bottom line - it’s a good book, especially if you are looking for fully detailed building instructions and programming instructions. The book covers 5 of Da Vinci greatest works - the armored car, the catapult, the revolving bridge, the aerial screw (known by mistake as the ‘helicopter’) and the flying machine. Each work is described in a chapter of its own with historical background, discussion of the particular LEGO challenges and mechanisms used, full building instructions and programming details in NXT-G, RobotC, NXC, pbLua and leJOS. Before getting into the detailed codes, a nice diagram explains the program flow. Paul also gave good introduction to NXT and Da Vinci, as well as nice outlook on future improvements one can attempt for the 5 models, and two other Da Vinchi inventions which may be attempted by the reader.
Having said allready that this is a good book, it does have some drawbacks. The major one, for me at least, was the use of many pieces which are not part of the Mindstorms NXT #8527 retail kit (or the #9797 educational base set). Unfortunatly, the book does not give alternatives using the parts in the basic sets parts, nor give any indication which extra sets are needed and where to buy them. Some models use hard-to-get parts, like the revolving bridge which uses the old-style turntable (Peeron #2855 and #2856). Unfortunatly, I could not build some of the models due to lack of pieces…
Paul gives programming instructions in five different languages. Alltough some will find this an excellent way to learn new languages by comparision, I think it is not important. One could have, for example, put all the extra codes online, leaving only NXT-G (and maybe RobotC) code in text. For young readers, these detailed textual codes would probably be somewhat intimidating.
Another nice-to-have feature which I lack, is an online page with more pictures and videos of the machines in action. I think this would help understand some of the more difficult constructions steps, and especialy the use of strings in models such as the revolving bridge and the flying machine.
Last, as in allmost all black-and-white books with building instructions, the graphical aspects are problematic. In some figures the casted shadows distracts the eye, while in others the pieces are too reflective and some even appear to be transparent! I know how hard it is to make publication quality building instructions… I just hope a better solution will come up soon (and with the release of LDD 2.2 it may be close, even though it still lacks a lot more Technic pieces and other features to be a good candidate to replace good old LeoCAD/MLCad).

Guy Ziv
NXTasy.org

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