Video tutorials -

• FIRST LEGO League

Football with robots could be quite fun. Football with LEGO Mindstorms robots is one of the popular categories for competitions with LEGO Mindstorms Robots. 

The FIRST LEGO League competition is similar each year. With a little experience you could accomplish most of mission. The goal of this episode is to introduce you to the course, its purpose and approach.  

One attachment to rule them all...We have seen it and it works -> solving most of the competition models with only one attachment. In this video tutorial without programming we would walk you through the principles and methods of using a single attachment for most of the FIRST LEGO League competition models. One can learn alot from using as few parts as possible to solve as many missions as possible.

Build a rack and try to lift the robot with this rack. 

Robotics competition is a large part of the FLL Competition. The field contains missions which give points and the main purpose is to gather maximum number of points for 2:30min. FIRST LEGO League competitions have different themes every year but the tasks have similar functionality. In this video tutorial we will give a brief of missions in Senior Solutions (the theme for 2012).

This tutorial demonstrates how a robot could align to a black line. The code for the program is available in the course. Aligning to black lines is popular at robotics competitions like FIRST LEGO League as it is the primary way to know where you are on the field and to develop a program that is reproducible. The attachment uses Luly, a small LEGO Education SPIKE Prime competition robot with 3D building instructions as a robot base.

Sometimes you could just throw a ball from base and solve a competition. Or at least many teams think so. In this video we would explore a very simple attachment for throwing balls from base. Can you use this for other missions? - we think so. Check out the video. 

Inertia triggered attachments does no require the use of a motor. Let the inertia do all the work. These kinds of attachments are very useful at robotics competitions like FIRST LEGO League and World Robot Olympiad. The robot moves, the attachment falls and grabs the ball. The attachment uses Luly, a small LEGO Education SPIKE Prime competition robot with 3D building instructions as a robot base.

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.

Build a robot base to use in the course. You can use the robot base provided by us or you can build one yourself. 

Build a similar mechanism to this one. Similar, but for your robot. This is the task for you. Try, give yourself half and hour or even an hour.

This is not the standard video lesson. We have always wanted to just destroy the field and see how easy it would be. We would prepare a detailed lesson in the next few months, but this was one of the first tries on completely destroying the FIRST LEGO League Seniour Solutions field.

Connect the attachment to the box robot and find the correct number of rotations of the middle motor that would bring the robot up and forward and would attach it to the mission model.

What is the end result? - have the attached on the mission model. What is the mechanism the would make the robot hang on the mission model.

One of the simplest tricks in the game - move, complete the mission and leave the attachment with the mission model. You don't have to return the attachment to the base. On some competitions there might be penalties, but it might be worth it, as you save time to complete another mission. This works especially well with large attachments.. The attachment uses Luly, a small LEGO Education SPIKE Prime competition robot with 3D building instructions as a robot base.

Here is the task for adding a beam on both sides of every gear wheel in your attachment.

Experiment with changing the orientation and direction of gear wheels. Here are part of the tasks that you should complete before moving forward with the course.

This tutorial demonstrates how a LEGO Education SPIKE Prime robot could stop when it reaches a wall. FIRST LEGO League competitions are held on tables that have border and it is sometimes useful to use the Ultrasonic sensor to detect the border and stop close to the border. The attachment uses Luly, a small LEGO Education SPIKE Prime competition robot with 3D building instructions as a robot base.

The important task before the solution. If you haven't done it already, then attach a new axle at the front of the robot and extend the construction with gear wheels and axles to reach the two legs at the two sides of the robot. 

Following the previous tutorials from the course, implement the calibration of the minimum and maximum values. 

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?

The dance mission is one of the most straightforward and easy missions to complete at the FIRST LEGO League competitions. This one is from RePLAY competition. The goal is to reach a specific place on the field and dance with the robot. You will see how we dance and have fun with our robot. Never forget to have fun during the competitions.

This animation demonstrates the principle of aligning to a line with two color sensors and a LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor robot. This is a useful concept for FIRST LEGO League competitions where you want to know exactly where you are on the field and to achieve consistent behavior. In the course lesson you will also find a live video tutorial where we enter into more details about aligning. We align the robot to a line by moving both sensors slowly until they both see a black line. When one of them sees the line we move only the other. At the end we return the first sensor back.

The goal of the Innovation project mission is probably to give everybody an easy win on the competition. A mission that does not require an attachment or a complex program and it the same time is quite interesting. In this video tutorial you will see our robot and our innovation project construction, along with how we complete the mission. Hope you like them!

This is a 10 out of 10 video tutorial that is different from the rest. We demonstrate how difficult it is to accomplish a mission and we use an attachment that is working 5 out of 10 times. Our goal with the video is to give everybody the understanding that taking your time to accomplish a mission is the right thing. Most of the 10 out of 10 tutorials at FLLCasts contain solutions and approaches that are working in a repeatable fashion. Not this one. See how difficult it is to accomplish a mission and that we also make mistakes.

In this short animation we demonstrate how the LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Distance sensors could be attached to the robot and then use to stop at distance from a wall. This wall could be the border of the field or another mission model. We need an attachment, we need a sensor and we need the robot. In the live video in the lesson we enter into more details and explanations of how the sensor is used. Programs for the distance sensor are provided in the lesson and in the LEGO Mindstorms Robot Inventor Programming course we enter into more details about how to program the distance sensor

The robot moves your Innovation Project onto the RePLAY logo or the gray area around the bench (M04).