Building Robots with Lego Mindstorms EV3
In this I made an introduction to building robots with Lego Mindstorms. In this post I will not develop my own robot but will build one of Lego’s creations: Track3r
Building
Instructions are quite simple and I was able to build in a few hours.
Connecting
I tested it with IR remote control and it works but I think the easiest and best way to control the robot is the iOS app.
To control the robot via app, first you need to have Bluetooth enabled both on your phone and EV3 brick:
After you install the app, connect it to the brick:
Once connected, selected the robot you want to control (Track3r in this case):
and the rest is just taking it to a test drive:
Conclusion
One problem I had was I ran out of batteries very quickly. EV3 brick take 6 AA batteries and I use rechargable batteries. After playing around with the robot for about half an hour I ran out of batteries. Unfortunately the design of the robot doesn’t take replacing batteries into account. It seems it would be a bit painful to remove the brick only to replace the batteries and put it back in. Well, there are other models I wanted to build anyway at least I have now more experience with building and controlling the pre-designed robots. I think the most fun is programming the brick so I will explore more of that in the future.
