Subject:
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Ideal Expansion or Companion to RIS
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Tue, 28 Dec 1999 18:15:32 GMT
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Original-From:
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The WordMeister <dwilcox@wordsmithdigital.com&NoMoreSpam&>
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Viewed:
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711 times
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My wife bought me the huge Code Pilot set for Christmas (taking advantage of
the Lego S@H $99 price), and it is a near-perfect expansion to the RIS. Two
clutch gears (!!!), another differential, great wheels, a zillion parts
(well, more than 1,300 anyway), another motor, 2 touch sensors, 4 electrical
cables, flex system parts (which I _think_ will be good for other robots as
well), connectors in gray, black, and green, and green axles.
I finished building the extremely cool main model yesterday (I always build
the main model once before the set becomes "parts"), and debugged it last
night. (Okay, so staying up until 2:00 a.m. to build on
the-day-after-Christmas did have a negative effect on my brain, despite
simultaneously watching "Airline Disasters" on The Learning Channel to
improve alertness. I discovered one place where I'd installed gears in the
wrong place, used the wrong length cables 3 times during construction, and
had to dismantle the cab at least 4 times to fix errors in it ...) Plus my
11-month-old son kept grabbing hands full of pieces and scattering them
throughout the house or dumping them from one sorting bin into another. One
turned up in my wife's baking pans cabinet. (He's so cute, though, and loves
to handle the pieces. He also impressed me by trying to put axles into wheel
hubs, and mimicking my scanning of the bar codes with the Code Pilot.)
It's a fairly tricky set to build. This is the first time I'd ever felt that
needle-nosed pliers would be useful for piece placement (especially during
my debugging and reconstruction phase), and the first time I'd
double-checked assembly by using the photograph on the box. I learned some
useful Technic building arrangements, as well as new concepts in geartrain
design.
The Code Pilot itself isn't comparable to the RCX, but it is rather
innovative. It will probably find its way into my Robot models, most likely
as a separate drive motor or drive motor/bump sensor subsystem.
--Doug Wilcox
WordSmith Digital Document Services
403 VFW Drive
Rockland, MA 02370
781-871-6162
fax 781-871-6264
http://www.wordsmithdigital.com
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