Long time readers here will know of my love for LEGO Mindstorms NXT, and my first NXT autopilot many years ago. So I was delighted to see this project, which uses an Arduino IMU plus NXT and the official First Robotics League TETRIX parts to create a LEGO quadcopter!
The NXT reads orientation information from the Arduino, calculates the motor speeds required to maintain stable flight, and sends these motor commands back to the Arduino, which spins the motors via the speed controllers.
So does it fly? Yep. Is it graceful? Nope. Check out the video of its first (and only) flight.
Comments
Anish: Yes, the Lego Mindstorms NXT brick uses a 32-bit ARM processor from Atmel.
have to admit looks like Next 2 block, which afaik is no ARM. U could load alternate platform on Next, so possiblities exist, not sure of the I/O. Lego does have customised I/O interfaces...definitely interesting project
But it doesn't have a phone somewhere. It needs to run ice cream sandwich, damnit.
Yep, I love the nxt. This is a great project and I am sure it will work well in the end :) The nxt is arm, 100mhz and can sort of multi-task which leads to some interesting thoughts of different programming possibilities.