Video tutorials

In part 1 of How to on Gears tutorial I introduced you to the basics of the gear systems. Now we are going to examinate gear systems with more than two gears and take a look at cascade gear systems.

We just had some enormous amount of fun with building and using a catapult/trebuchet. Yes they are quite different, but the result achieved in the lesson is something in the middle. Learn how to fire elements using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 or NXT robotics set. Challange yourself, your team or your students to build it and fire elements as far and as accurate as possible.

If you think that the quick pinless attachments shown in video 63 are quick enough, see this tutorial and you will find out that the quick pinless attachments could be even quicker. These attachments can work without motors but by using the inertia forces.

You think that you can quickly change the attachments of your LEGO Mindstorms EV3 competition robot? Are you sure? In this first episode of the series you will see how to create and attach attachments without using pins and how faster and easier this could be. You will see the design logic of a few attachments and how they work on the field. 

In Episode 58 we introduced you to a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 Modular robot. In this tutorial, we show you how we reached that construction. We start from a construction found on the Internet and take you through the process of examining and improving it, till we reach a more stable and reliable robot.

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.

How do you lift heavy objects with an attachment? In this episode we show a simple, interesting, but yet not very popular way to lift something heavy with and LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot and without gears and motors as attachment. As a specific example we are using the Strength Exercise mission from the FIRST LEGO League 2012 competition. 

In this episode, we introduce a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 version of competition robot construction. It is a modular construction, with medium motor for additional attachments and two light or colour sensors for orientating on the field.

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.

In this episode we continue from Episode 55 and we improve the durability and stability of the attachment for a LEGO Mindstorms EV3 robot. Many times attachments are not very stable which results in gaps between parts. The goal of the video is to give basic construction ideas.

Based on feedback from many of you in this episode I would like to show you how to build an active attachment that changes the orientation of a gear wheel placed vertically to a gear wheel placed horizontally. This attachment could be used in competitions and shows a basic principle of changing the orientation. All attachments could follow the same principle. 

Gears could be a powerful tool for those who know how to use them appropriately. In this episode we introduce some of the basic terms and concepts behind using gears in your construction.

In this tutorial we present a way to align your robot to a black line. Go through common difficulties, that the teams face, when they need to align their robot, and provide a solution for them.

We continue the discussion of the Robot Design category from the FIRST LEGO League Competition. This time we stop on the programming - how to evaluate the programming of the team during its preparation for the competition.

The FIRST LEGO League Competition is divided in four categories. The Robot Design category is not as popular as the Robot Game, but still is 25% of the end result of a team. In this tutorial we will stop and make an overview of it.

This video tutorial reviews the EV3 Gyro Sensor and the HiTechnic Gyro Sensor for the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics Kit. We compare the two sensors and demonstrate them in action.

In this tutorial we introduce the basic algorithm for following a line with one sensor and review the algorithm for quickly followwing a black line with one sensor, implementing both with the Mindstorms EV3 robotics kit.

After several questions about the use of the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Light Sensor with the EV3 software, we have decided to go through this problem in this video tutorial and pay special attention to the Raw Sensor Value Block.

Each year the FIRST LEGO League robotics Competition involves loops. In this video tutorial I will go through the most common way of taking loops, show its disadvantages and suggest another way to do it.

An interesting question that has arise is whether we can use the LEGO Mindstorms EV3-G Software to program the NXT brick. In this episode we will go through the blocks from the EV3-G Software and see which works with the NXT Hardware and which does not.

There is no block for programming the Ultrasonic Sensor in the retail version of the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 software. In this video tutorial we will show you how you can download & import such blocks in order to use the sensor.

In the first part we built our first 3D LEGO model. Today we will smooth the model we have created and go through the process of creating PDF instructions for building it.

In this tutorial we will build our first 3D LEGO model using LDraw. I will build it using two different programs based on the LDraw library - MLCAD and LeoCAD.

In the previous part of the video lesson we showed how imprecise a chain LEGO Mindstorms robot could be if its positioning does not rely on sensors, but only on the use of move block. In this tutorial we will show the same thing, but using robot on tires.

You are not using sensors?! You are positioning the mindstorms robot only by moving forward, backwards and rotating it. That`s one of the BIGGEST mistakes teams make on the FIRST LEGO League competitions. In this video we are showing a robot with chains and how imprecise are the results are when you are not using sensors. 

Learn how to set up LDD and Ldraw on your Windows computer. Get one step closer to building your first 3D LEGO Model.

A human being walks with an average speed of about 5 km/h (3 miles/h). In this video tutorial we will develop a block for LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3, that measures the speed of the robot in distance/time units where time will be configurable and could be 1 second or 0.5 seconds or any other number of seconds you pass as a param to the block. Measuring the speed of the robot is very powerful if you start building an Artificial Inteligence for your robot and is quite fun :)