Subject:
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Re: New Syngress RIS 2.0 Book!
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.books, lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Tue, 12 Nov 2002 15:34:37 GMT
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Viewed:
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14837 times
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In lugnet.books, Dean Hystad writes:
> I did a little review of the "10 Cool Projects" book from Syngress for the
> Dark Side Developers kit (DSDK) a little while ago. I suppose I should
> supply another review for the newer book based on the RIS V2.0 kit. Here • goes:
>
> "10 COOL LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention System 2 Projects" is the second
> in the 10 Cool Projects series of books from Syngress. It is essentially a
> really thick constructopedia that contains 10 Amazing projects you can build
> under an hour. I can't say how "amazing" the projects are, but most of them
> can be built in under an hour.
>
> The book was developed using LPUB from Kevin Clague. The same LDraw to
> photo-realistic imaging software that was used on the DSDK book. The
> instructions are very crisp gray scale images with some descriptive text
> included. The construction images are easier to follow than those supplied
> by LEGO. The added parts for each construction step are hilighted by
> "ghosting out" pieces added in previous steps. K'nex uses this technique in
> their instructions, and I think it really helps when building complicated
> machines.
I didn't know that K'nex did this (or had forgotten), but I've always
appreciated this in MLCad, which is where I got the idea.
>
> I had a beef with the DSDK book in that it was really just a fancy
> constructopedia. I was hoping for more general purpose building
> information. I'm happy to say that the second book contains a few perls,
> but I still recommend buying the Ferrari book if you really want to learn
> LEGO robot building. This is a project based book.
My wife loves to build with LEGO, but only if she has step by step building
instructions. I perfer to create and be inventive over the sequential nature
of following someone else's design. I hope that someday I can write a book
about bipeds and/or pneumatics that has more words than pictures. There is a
lot yet to be said about these two topics.
For me the robots are just an implementation of the important concepts. I long
to write about the concepts.
<snip>
>
> MINDSTORMS F1 Racer - A car with a rear differential and front wheel
> steering. Lacking any sensor feedback this is more of an RC car that you
> can control using the LEGO remote than it is a robot. The instructions for
> this chapter didn't turn out really well. It uses lots of flexible parts
> that are really difficult to model. If anyone knows of a good way to
> generate LDRAW files for bent ribbed hose please let me know.
Dean, I watched you folks struggle with hoses and wondered what you were doing
about electical cables, an integral part of the RIS set. I madly started
working on a program that synthesized these parts from specifications placed
directly in your LDraw files. I did not get it done in time for the RIS book,
but a few of the robots in the RIS + UBS book use it.
Alex Witherspoon (Tonya Witherspoon's son) used pneumatics from the UBS in one
of his designs. Building instructions that contain pneumatics without hoses
are basically worthless, so I'm glad that I was able to work with Tonya to get
pneumatic hoses and electrical cables added to Alex's design.
They came up short of robots for the RIS + UBS book, so at the last minute I
put together documentation for one of my RIS walkers. I was able to use lsynth
(my bendable part synthesizer) to create the electrical cable for my walker.
My walker is a weight shifter that bends at the hips, yet the feet are always
parallel to the floor. It is a style of biped that I've not seen others use.
It can walk forwards, backwards and turn right or left going forwards or
backwards.
The latest version of LSynth and LPub both know how to deal with synthesized
parts including:
Ribbed hoses
Flex-system hoses
Pneumatic Hoses,
Electrical cables
Fiber Optic cables
Flexible axles
Rubber bands with any number of pulleys (both inside and outside the band)
and rubber bands that cross (any number of times.)
Rubber tread
Plastic tread
Plastic chain
LPub recogonizes these synthesized parts and gives generic pictures of the
parts in the part list images.
There are still a few bugs to fix in LSynth, but new versions of LSynth and
LPub will be available very soon.
> A big problem with the last book was that the contributors were not given
> credit for their creations. The acknowledgments tell us who was involved,
> but not what designs they created. That is corrected in this second book.
I was glad to see that they fixed this issue.
Kevin
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: New Syngress RIS 2.0 Book!
|
| I did a little review of the "10 Cool Projects" book from Syngress for the Dark Side Developers kit (DSDK) a little while ago. I suppose I should supply another review for the newer book based on the RIS V2.0 kit. Here goes: "10 COOL LEGO Mindstorms (...) (22 years ago, 12-Nov-02, to lugnet.books, lugnet.robotics)
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