Book Image

Smart Robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor

By : Aaron Maurer
Book Image

Smart Robotics with LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor

By: Aaron Maurer

Overview of this book

LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor is the latest addition to the LEGO MINDSTORMS theme. It features unique designs that you can use to build robots, and also enable you to perform activities using the robot inventor application. You'll begin by exploring the history of LEGO MINDSTORMS, and then delve into various elements of the Inventor kit. Moving on, you'll start working on different projects which will prepare you to build a variety of smart robots. The first robotic project involves designing a claw to grab objects, and helps you to explore how a smart robot is used in everyday life and in industry. The second project revolves around building a working guitar that can be played and modified to meet the needs of the user. As you advance, you'll explore the concept of biomimicry as you discover how to build a scorpion robot. In addition to this, you'll also work on a classic robotic challenge by building a sumobot. Throughout the book, you'll come across a variety of projects that will provide you with hands-on experience in building creative robots, such as building a Dragster, Egg Decorator, and Plankton from Spongebob Squarepants. By the end of this LEGO book, you'll have got to grips with the concepts behind building a robot, and also found creative ways to integrate them using the application based on your creative insights and ideas.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Building the guitar

You will build the guitar in sections. Each section will provide a basic framework for the guitar, but please keep in mind that with all the builds you have the space and opportunities to build it the way you want. In terms of the guitar, the key pieces to customize it will be the body of the guitar, the top of the neck of the guitar, and the light-emitting diode (LED) lights. Additionally, when you get to the coding, you can really fine-tune it to have the guitar sound just the way you want it to.

Let's get started with the building.

Assembling the neck

We will start with the neck of the guitar. For this, we are going to use the 1x3 colored Technic pieces to create sections for the color sensor to detect. The color sections are reminiscent of the Guitar Hero guitars, but instead of pressing buttons we will use the color sensor to detect the colors.

You will build five different colored sections for the fretboard. This maximizes the length of the...