Content for Attachments

What should you as a teacher know when the students are trying to achieve a program and robot attachment that could reproduce their behaviour 9 out of 10 times. 

In this tutorial, we add another mission to our current program. This mission is - hanging the Gecko from the FIRST LEGO League Animal Allies. 

Think of an attachment that leaves the Gecko on the mission model. Don't use the robot attachment that we already have. Just the box robot and the gecko. Nothing should support the Gecko when it is hanged on the mission model. 

Calculate the number of rotations you have to do with the motor to rotate the final small 8 teeth driving gear wheel to 1.25 rotations?

What should you do as a teacher when the students are calculating the gear ratios and number of needed rotations?

You need to pull. And also catch. You need a carabiner. We have done a number of videos on carabiners and this is one of the ideas for the FIRST LEGO League 2015 Trash Trek competition.

You can collect the car for scrap or repair it. The ELM teams decide to repair it. This requires them to place the engine in the car and it's very interesting to think about this problem.

This is a very interesting idea that is worth sharing with the rest of the teams and the ELM team has provided it to us. Check out how they drop a LEGO human at a specific place.

In this video lesson I am building a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 active attachment powered by a small gear wheel. The attachment could move up and down, it is very useful for collecting objects. It could easily be adapted and used on other robots.

We are making a parallel with Video Lesson 56 from the series and we are also showing ways to improve the stability of an axle which is most of the time neglected, but could lead to great problems.

The attachment builds on previous episodes this time using two LEGO rubber bands. When a lever is released the rubber band exerts pressure on it and moves it in a circular motion. As an example we are solving the 2012 FIRST LEGO League, Senior Solutions, stove mission (which was quite interesting as a mission)

In this episode we look at the way this robot is balanced. A well-balanced robot could handle heavier attachments without losing track of its position on the robotics competition field. 

Previously we caught the Truck with two rubber bands. The next step was to lift it. For lifting we used the Medium LEGO Mindstorms EV3 motors. In this video we are extending the attachment so that we could catch also the Ambulance. In forth video we would explore how to release both vehicles after transporting them.

In this episode we build a reusable attachment for a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot that changes gears orientation and direction. It is one of the most useful attachments that you could use to move levers up/down and right/left. Adding the attachment on the robot takes 2-3 seconds and shows a very useful general principle of how to build reusable attachments.

In this tutorial of the series we would get into more details on how the flywheel works, what's its purpose and how the whole attachment is triggered with the first rubber band.

Let's try to integrate more of the things we have learned into a single attachment. One that could accumulate energy, conserve it and use it at the appropriate time. All this because of a Rubber Band and a Flywheel - and if you don't know what a flywheel is you should definitely watch this videos 

One of the most interesting challenges in the series of FLL Competitions. Move a block and add additional floor on top of the block without damaging the construction. In this tutorial we would focus only this mission and we would achieve two movements with only one motor which makes the attachment quite powerful.

Rubber bands can be quite powerful. Based on several requests from you we are starting a series on using the LEGO Rubber bands available in the Mindstorms set.