Whether you have a LEGO Mindstorms or a LEGO Spike, robots are so much fun! Just use your imagination to create your own robotic invention!
We had so much fun building a ballerina robot using an EV3 to control her dance and play her music. We named our robot “Minnie Fay,” after a character from the musical Hello Dolly!. We love ballet, and we thought that it would be fun to build a robot dancer! Robots can be anything that you have an interest in!
We were so excited to present on the subject of building for reliability in the FLL Share & Learn Community Webinar Series. We hope that you find it useful regarding how to build a sturdy and durable robot and how to optimize your robot’s build for mission consistency.
Gears are everywhere, from seemingly simple toys to as complex things as cars. We think that it is amazing that LEGO Technic has incorporated so many gears into their sets to create functioning machines or robots to be used in FLL (FIRST LEGO League). In addition, many other LEGO themes such as City and Friends have used gears for many of their special functions. In this article, we will show you the types of gears as well as their uses.
As part of messing around with pieces and looking for angles to help fix a FLL attachment we were working on, one of our team members built this heart made out of angles. Angles are awesome! We kept this Technic “doodle” around to take pictures of it to share with you. So Happy St. Valentine’s Day and have fun learning about Technic angles!
Today we are going to talk about having fun with your Technic and EV3 pieces. For our FLL team, part of sitting around and building robots and attachments involves build “doodling.” We are not doodling on paper. We are “doodling” with the LEGO pieces themselves! We are building little structures as we mess with the pieces, learning how they work and coming up with new ideas. One of our recent ideas was to make LEGO Technic fidget spinners!
When you are building with LEGO Technic, sometimes you need extra supporting pieces on beams to keep your model from falling apart when you handle it. This is especially important for LEGO robots used for competition. We thought up some ways over the past three years to help with this problem. We will share some of those in this blog post.
LEGO is pretty generous. In all of their sets, they have some extra pieces that are left over after following building instructions, but LEGO only gives you very small extra pieces, like studs, connectors, half bushes, etc. LEGO almost never gives you large extra pieces. If you have a large piece left over after building a set, check through the instructions again to see if you missed putting that piece in the model as part of the steps. In recent LEGO sets, each step has an inventory listed for the step. To avoid leaving pieces out while we build, we like to find the pieces for each step and make sure we use them all before moving on. When we have a large piece like a full brick or beam left over, we scan the inventory listed for each step to look for the type/color of piece we have left over. Usually, we find the step we overlooked that piece. It has happened to us many times in different LEGO sets we build.
There are many types of LEGO Technic connectors, but many people don’t understand the differences between them. In this article, we will show you different connectors and for which ones color matters.
The Moment Makers 
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