robots
Hi All. Remember me? I've got a blog.
Let's just pretend this is something I do, and gloss over the two year or so hiatus. Okay? Great.
This weekend, we played with legos. I freaking love legos. I grew up on legos. I'm not sure why we didn't do much with the kids with legos before now, but, well, Nora was little, and they get all over, and they were on a high shelf, whatever.
But, so this weekend we got them out. And it was great. Big Success.
I should clarify, the ones we got out were all of mine from childhood, plus the robotics set Lara got me for Christmas probably nearly a decade ago. The thing that kicked this off was that Anya got a couple of lego sets for her birthday.
I'm just going to quit rambling and get to the point. We made a robot. A couple of them. It was fun. And frustrating. But fun.
Here's the robot.
This is version 1.1 or so. It received some modifications after testing revealed that the tracks didn't work so well, although they looked cool. The pincers on the front don't really do anything, other than look cool. We need a third motor for that. The kids want that third motor. I want that third motor.
While I was tinkering with "big robot", Anya and Evan built their own. Here is Evan's:
And Anya's:
With a rider:
My Geek Dad heart is just about busting with pride. My kids like legos. And not just any legos, but the gears and wheels and chains.
As it happens, we built the robot, but didn't have any way to program them. The whole thing kind of snowballed, and I hadn't planned on making a robot at all. I sort of said, hey, we should do this sometime, and then sometime very quickly turned into now. I hadn't used this stuff in years, and as it turned out, the software is old, and our Windows is new, and they didn't play nice, and it took me until the next day until we could actually get the robot to do something. But then, shockingly, it did. It wasn't perfect, but by the time we got around to shooting a video, it did pretty good. Mostly. There's still room for improvement.
Dads, build your robots strong, or they'll break when your kids try to turn them on, and your failure will be preserved for posterity.
The idea is that it follows the line. It does pretty good, but when it loses it, it just sort of wanders around. And then breaks. :)
Let's just pretend this is something I do, and gloss over the two year or so hiatus. Okay? Great.
This weekend, we played with legos. I freaking love legos. I grew up on legos. I'm not sure why we didn't do much with the kids with legos before now, but, well, Nora was little, and they get all over, and they were on a high shelf, whatever.
But, so this weekend we got them out. And it was great. Big Success.
I should clarify, the ones we got out were all of mine from childhood, plus the robotics set Lara got me for Christmas probably nearly a decade ago. The thing that kicked this off was that Anya got a couple of lego sets for her birthday.
I'm just going to quit rambling and get to the point. We made a robot. A couple of them. It was fun. And frustrating. But fun.
Here's the robot.
This is version 1.1 or so. It received some modifications after testing revealed that the tracks didn't work so well, although they looked cool. The pincers on the front don't really do anything, other than look cool. We need a third motor for that. The kids want that third motor. I want that third motor.
While I was tinkering with "big robot", Anya and Evan built their own. Here is Evan's:
And Anya's:
With a rider:
My Geek Dad heart is just about busting with pride. My kids like legos. And not just any legos, but the gears and wheels and chains.
As it happens, we built the robot, but didn't have any way to program them. The whole thing kind of snowballed, and I hadn't planned on making a robot at all. I sort of said, hey, we should do this sometime, and then sometime very quickly turned into now. I hadn't used this stuff in years, and as it turned out, the software is old, and our Windows is new, and they didn't play nice, and it took me until the next day until we could actually get the robot to do something. But then, shockingly, it did. It wasn't perfect, but by the time we got around to shooting a video, it did pretty good. Mostly. There's still room for improvement.
Dads, build your robots strong, or they'll break when your kids try to turn them on, and your failure will be preserved for posterity.
The idea is that it follows the line. It does pretty good, but when it loses it, it just sort of wanders around. And then breaks. :)
posted by Steve
1 Comments:
That looks like fun! Nice to see you blogging again, I mean, ummm, you've always been blogging :)
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