Google Science Fair: My Project

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View this particular post here, at leonoverweel.com.

PriNXT – Beginnigs

It’s not quite finished, but I’m really excited about this next project, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it beforehand. So, what is this mysterious project I speak of?

Basically, I’m building a printer out of Mindstorms NXT (hence the name, “PriNXT”). I know it’s probably been done before, so I’ve purposely not gone looking for how other people did it – I wanted this to be more of a challenge. And, so far, a challenge it has been. I’m pretty sure that it’s the most complex build I’ve done yet, mainly because I had to fit three motors, a bunch of gears, three long wires, and support beams all into a restricted place that has to be able to move around freely; it also can’t rest on the paper it’s printing on, so all the weight had to be distributed to the sides. I’m not going to try to explain how I got it working until I shoot some nice closeups of it, so there will be a whole post dedicated to PriNXT’s hardware sometime later this week.

Now, here’s a list of things: (very descriptive name for a list, I know)

• I’m going to try to write a basic text editing program in RobotC, so you can “type” something on one NXT and then transfer it to PriNXT to get it printed. That would probably use Bluetooth.
• I’m considering to add functions for underlining text, making it bold, and even italicizing it.
• The color scheme for PriNXT itself: White, light gray, dark gray and red.

In other news: I made a Technic camera jib for my iPhone, which, combined with the video editing software I got for Christmas, will make for some nice footage in the video for PriNXT.

Merry Christmas!

Merry christmas and a happy new year everyone!

I know I haven’t posted anything lately (sorry), but worry-you-not — I’m finishing something very exciting right now, and I think it’ll will be up and running by the end of the year.

In other news, you might’ve noticed that my blog’s url has changed to worldofmindstorms.com, instead of the old dimastero.wordpress.com. Why? Because ‘dimastero’ doesn’t relate to MindStorms NXT in any way, and because I think the url looks better this way. Again, worry-you-not: all the old links to specific posts and pages still work (thx WP!).

So, once again, merry christmas and a happy new year!