Video tutorials

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.