Lego Engines!

Try this on for size! This was built by one of my 7th grade students. It's powered by a Lego Mindstorms NXT and actually runs pretty darn smoothley!



Square piston and crankshaft.



Interesting spoked flywheel and the "electric start".



Intake / exhaust port at the bottom of the cylinder.



Video of it in action!



He said he just kinda started putting stuff together and this is what came out of it. Very impressive!


Now, I could have sworn I posted this one somewhere but can't seem to find it... So here it is (again?).

This was built by one of my 8th grade students that was also building my wobbler air engine.  Same story- he was playing with legos and this sort of emerged from the chaos.  This one even RUNS on compressed air.  It takes a LOT of it though-  lots of leaks through all the gaps.







Kind of hard to see but if you look to the right of the little square lego piece you can see the air intake port.



And of course a video of it in action!

Cookie Dough and Lego Robots.

Well, the cookie dough fundraiser is almost over.  I've been keeping track of my students sales and if they are about average for the rest of the school it looks like I'll be getting a nice bit of money to help update some stuff in the shop.  I have a list of things I'd like to update- and if I were to add everything up I bet there's over $50,000 worth of crap on my wish list.  Ain't gonna get anywhere near that much, but its fun to dream.

In the mean time, one of the top items on my list is new Lego robots.  I've got 12 extremely well used Lego NXT's.  Pulled them out this morning to use in class and two, yes TWO of the 12 screens worked.  Not a big deal, we can work without the screens- just means more headache for everyone involved, and its a common problem with a fairly easy fix.  So I spent my prep, lunch, and a few minutes here and there while students were working trying to get them fixed.




Managed to get all but 3 of them working, and it looks like those three are finally toast.  Might try and find some new resistors and give that a try, but for now they're just going to have to live with it.

Lego came out with a new version- EV3- last year.  I really only need the "brains" and maybe a couple of the new sensors, but by the time you buy the parts individually you're already almost at the price of the complete kit.  Not that I need all the extra legos- we've got boxes and boxes left over from past FLL tournaments and the 12 kits we already have.

The kicker-  the district won't let me surplus the ones I currently have and re-invest the money in my shop.  So, they'll probably end up in some closet somewhere for the next 20 years, and some teacher down the road will toss 'em in the dumpster (along with the table saw and disk sander I "surplussed" a couple years ago).  Great plan guys.  Guess I just have to hope I got enough cookie dough money to upgrade the robots and get the new curriculum from Carnegie Mellon that goes with it.

Counting money tomorrow, so keep your fingers crossed.  Anyone wanna buy some cookie dough!?