The Every Day, Every Week, Every Month Inventor's Blog

WIRE-ME: LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Robot and Contest Winner!

WIRE-ME, a LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT robot I made for a contest on The NXT Step, got a bronze medal (worth $50)! You can see it on NXTLOG. The NXT Step contest topic is here.
I also made a video:

Sorry for the short post, I will get a guest post soon on The NXT Step and will post a long one there.

100% on LEGO Star Wars!

We got 100% on LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga! And guess what the secret prize is? Well, we still aren't sure, but there is one thing, that all characters you make can use the force and double jump. There might be something else, but I have Googled it about 10 times today, and not one match. I would ask in the Lucasfilm forums, but they're broken.

And now an image:

12!

Hooray! I'm 12 today! I got a LEGO Mindstorms NXT Education set and an extra parts set. It all cost about $330, without shipping, and I paid for most of it. My first project will be modifying Zachary's LEGO Motorized Walking AT-AT so it uses the NXT.

Lego!

Wow! The Lego brick turns 50 at exactly 1:58pm today, January 28, 2008!

Here are some facts about Lego (you can see a time line here):

There are about 62 Lego bricks for every one of the world's 6 billion inhabitants.

Children around the world spend 5 billion hours a year playing with Lego bricks.

More than 400 million people around the world have played with Lego bricks.

19 billion Lego elements are produced every year.

There are more than 915 million combinations possible for six 2 x 4 Lego bricks of the same color.

7 Lego sets are sold by retailers every second around the world.

The Lego bricks sold in one year would circle the world 5 times.

Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, used Lego bricks to build the external low-cost and expandable casing for 10 4GB hard disks when they were busy developing the Google search engine (today, they have reportedly been used in Google's college graduate recruiting exercises to test potential candidate's creative horsepower).

If stacked on top of one another, all the Lego pieces ever made would form 10 towers reaching all the way from the Earth to the Moon.

Millie Gets A Tooth!

Millie got her first tooth on Saturday!! And it's New Year (Happy New Year!)! And I love HTML, Javascript, and CSS! Which is why all this text is blinking! Just use the < blink > and < /blink > tags (but don't put the spaces in). And we got Lego Star Wars The Complete Saga for the Wii! It has all the episodes and 360 levels!

Mii Got A Wii

I got a Wii for Christmas (it was totally unexpected!)! Wii also got Wii Play and an extra controller (it came in Wii Play). For some reason, the extra controller didn't come with a Nunchuck controller. Ohh, my arm... I shouldn't have played so much Wii Tennis yesterday...

2nd Place!!!

YAY!!! We got 2nd place in the FIRST LEGO League tournament Tullahoma Local!
At 8:00 (central time), we got to the tournament. We had left Stuart's house at about 7:45 (eastern time). We had thought we would get there a half hour early, but we got there an hour early! There were about 8 teams. At 10:35, we had our first round. I was running the robot, and Eddie helped me. We got 170 points. We messed up a lot, but we still had two rounds left. At 11:05, we had our second round. Eddie was running the robot, and I helped him. Everything went smoothly, except for the the Powerline. The robot decided to put the Powerline over only ONE area. We got 200 points. The third round I was running the robot and Eddie helped me. Everything went fine except the Dam and Powerline. When the robot was coming back from doing the Dam, the Bumper caught on the side of the Dam and pulled it back so it touched a house and didn't go across the whole river. When we did the Powerline, it pushed the Dam so it crossed the river (it still touched a house). We would have only gotten 190 points (courtesy of the Dam), but the robot decided to place the Powerline over TWO areas (therefore getting 10 more points). To see our scores, click here. To see the schedule and score sheet for the tournament, click here. At a regular tournament, they don't have places.

FIRST LEGO League

On the 3rd we have our first FIRST LEGO League Tournament. It is the Tullahoma Local event. I have not said anything about this because I wanted it to be a sort-of secret. Our team is "Team Terastorm", named after Mindstorms NXT (that is what we are using; some old teams still have their old Mindstorms RXC) with "Tera" instead of "Mind" ("Tera" is the new "In" number) and we added "Team" because it sounded good. Tullahoma Local is a practice event, then comes the Chattanooga event, then the Tennessee State Tournament. There are five members and three coaches. The members are: Patrick Sims, Michael Cook, Eddie and Bennett Sunder, and me. The coaches are: Stuart Wood, Ed Sunder, and Jeffrey Cross (my Dad).

Scooba Away!

We now have a remanufactured iRobot Scooba 5999 (before it was remanufactured, it was a 5800). Scoobas are robotic mops that vacuum, wash, scrub, and dry (they squeegee up the water). The package came with one 8-oz. bottle of Clorox Scooba cleaning solution, measuring cup, suction bulb (to prep and maintain Scooba's pump), standard Scooba battery, power supply, and one Virtual Wall.

Roomba Away!

Yes! Yesterday we got a iRobot Roomba! A Roomba is a robotic vacuum, and it drives around vacuuming until the floor is so clean that you get mad at it because it cleans better that you, even though it cleans in the weirdest pattern you could ever imagine. One really nice thing is that you can program it to do whatever you want, so maybe I can finally learn how to program computers! We got a remanufactured Roomba 4130 Clean Blue, upgraded to the rank of a Roomba Discovery, and only the outside is original. The package came with the Roomba (duh), a Roomba Remote, two Virtual Wall units, a Home Base, an Advanced Power System Fast Charger, a wall mount, an extra filter and a cleaning tool.

Local Corn Snake Sets Speed Eating Record

On Friday, we got a new camera. And yesterday, my Dad got a iPhone and Slithery ate a mouse in 2 minutes and 57 seconds, her personal best

Walking

Three words: Millie can walk. Yesterday Millie officially became our youngest walker. She walked eight or nine steps. She can also stand up as long as she wants to. When we get a new camera I will post some pictures of her walking.

Hooray!

Hooray! Yesterday, Slithery ate her first mouse in 40 days! 41 days ago she ate two mice and stopped eating. Now I am not sure which way you are supposed to count the number of days because she eats once a week. The last time she ate was May 9th, but normally she would not eat until the 16th. But the good news is... she ate.

62 1/4" Tall...

Wow! I am now 62 1/4" tall! There is a picture of me that Daddy took with his apple laptop. We used his laptop because our camera broke a few months ago. Some of the pictures in my family blog we took with the office camera. That night we took 190 pictures (I took most of them), and the next day I took 248 pictured in one hour! First, I improved the quality of the picture on Picasa2 and discovered a bunch of stuff. Then I stretched it two different ways on Paint. Oh, the wonders I can do with Paint! I can do a lot of stuff with Paint. If you really, really want to know how I stretched myself on Paint, I can tell you. And if you want to know how to use Paint and Picasa really well, tell me and I can show you how. Also, our housemate, Alyssa, has a blog.

Never Thought This Would Happen...

Four words: My snake laid eggs. Not chicken eggs, Not lizard eggs, but nice, oval, infertile snake eggs. "Why did you think she was a he?" you ask. Well, for one, I thought and hoped she was a he, but that does not make any difference. Also, I have a snake book, and it said one way to know is to count the subcaudal scales (the scales beneath the tail) from the vent to where the tail starts to get narrower. It says that male corn snakes have 7-12 subcaudal scales between the two points and females have 2-4. you might not understand what I just said, but if you look it up in Google you will probably find out. There are many other reasons but I will not state them today. I found out two days ago and I started a blog yesterday but the computer messed up and erased it. She is still in the same place but not in the same position. She is in the way of me getting the rest of the eggs and does not want to be touched. Oh well.