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Showing posts from 2019

FLL EV3 Robot

This blog post is about our current EV3 robot we're planning to use in the 2023/2024 FLL competition. Some features: 2 large motors for steering. 2 medium motors for attachments.  2 colour sensors for picking up the white and black lines, also used for line squaring. 1 gyro sensor. To enable attachments to be changed as quickly as possible we're using gravity to keep the gears connected, i.e. you don't need to fasten anything to the robot. Every attachment has 2x 12 tooth double bevel gear (part 32270) which comes in contact with the 2x 20 tooth double bevel gears (part 32269) on the robot. The medium motors are horizontally aligned on the robots, but we use 12 tooth double bevel gears to convert that to vertical alignments. These in turn are connected to 20 tooth double bevel gears, and the attachments in turn connect to these 20 tooth double bevel gears with their 12 tooth double bevel gears.  The complete robot is modelled in Bricklink Studio 2 . You can download the rob

Windows Hyper-V Server 2019

This post will explain how to use the free Hyper-V Windows 2019 Server version. This version doesn't come with any GUI interface as provided in the full Windows 2019 Server version. Instead it comes with a character interface, but with the help of some third party tools you can easily get a fully functional Hyper-V server for free. The following will be assumed: You have a dedicated server connected to a network and you want to install Hyper-V 2019 on this server to run Virtual Machines and/or act as a file server. You have physical access to this server to do the installation. You have another machine connected to the same network to do remote management, running a recent version of Microsoft Windows. You don't want to join a domain or use Active Directory. You can do this if you want to, but this is not included in this post. First you'll need to download the Hyper-V 2019 ISO from  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-hyper-v-server-2019 . You’ll

Lego EV3 Home / Retail version (31313) sorting tray

The Lego EV3 Education core set (45544) comes with a sorting tray (see e.g.  https://stemrobotics.cs.pdx.edu/sites/default/files/EV3%20Organizers.pdf ). It seems there is nothing similar for the Lego EV3 Retail / Home version (31313). Our Lego Robotics club received some EV3 Home version kits and the kids can take these kits home to play & learn. This is my first attempt of constructing a sorting tray. I'm sure it's not perfect, so I'll update as we go. I've copied the images from  http://robotsquare.com/2013/11/25/difference-between-ev3-home-edition-and-education-ev3/ , which also offers a nice explanation of the difference between the two versions. Top tray: ( High resolution ) Bottom tray: ( High resolution ) Part list: PDF document for all the parts, sorted by block (A-M for the top tray, Z for the bottom tray).

Installing Lego Digital Designer (LDD) on Windows 10

If you're using Windows 10 18.09 or later and try to install Lego Digital Designer (LDD) 4.3.11 you'll probably get an installation error for Adobe Flash Player. However, there is an easy way around it: Download the installation file for LDD 4.3.11. Rename the .exe file to .zip. If you don't see the .exe extension in Explorer, go to "View - Options" on the Explorer menu, then under the "View" tab deselect the "Hide extensions for known file types". Open the zip file with Windows Explorer. Copy all files in the zip to another directory on your computer. In the new folder: Delete install_flash_player_active_x.exe. Copy OpenGLChecker.exe and rename it to install_flash_player_active_x.exe. Run LDDSetup.exe. In short the installer will execute install_flash_player_active_x.exe during the installation process, but all it does now is to execute the same logic as what OpenGLChecker does. In theory you can run any .exe that will not retu