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Archive for the ‘Lego Mindstorms NXT’ Category

how to fix a clicking bricked lego mindstorms nxt

January 14th, 2008

I happens to have a LEGO Mindstorms NXT.
I just love it!

I have been doing/playing with LEGO all my life.
Today my youngest wanted to build robots with me.
He is 3½ years old, so we build parts of it together but I do the programming.
Soon he will learn or at least so I hope.

But when updating the firmware from version 1.03 to 1.05, things went bad.
Somehow the flashing process failed and I ended up with a bricked “brick”.

At the time I didn’t see how funny this actually was. But I was lucky to find a way to
fix this after a bit of googling. The process involves hitting a hidden reset switch.

The blog suggested that this switch is the one under one of the batteries.
That didn’t help anything, the NXT brick keeps saying “click click click”.
I actually assembled the NXT brick just to see if the switch was broken.
Which it wasn’t, and to be honest I really didn’t believe it my self.

But then i found another switch…

It turns out that the right switch to press with batteries inserted and no USB
attached is locate on the backside of the NXT brick in the upper left hole just
below the USB plug.

Holding it for 5 seconds did the trick.

The NXT brick now correctly boots into flashing mode.

Start up your Mindstorms NXT software and flash the (new) firmware
via the menu “Tools -> Update NXT firmware”.

If I just knew that from the very start…

Hope this helps you.

Benjamin Sølberg Lego Mindstorms NXT

NXT/RCX line follow programs

November 9th, 2006

“Toeing the Line” - a very nice paper, by ninth grader Jonathan Gray, comparing several different line following strategies. Although written for the RCX, this paper provides an excellent example of performance testing and analysis, as well as presentation of results.

The above document can be used for inspiration when playing with LEGO Mindstorms NXT and doing a “Line Follower” robot.

Benjamin Sølberg Lego Mindstorms NXT

Lego Mindstorms NXT links

November 9th, 2006

I have just bought a Lego Mindstorms NXT robotic kit and it really rocks!

I have already been programming it in native LabView and

http://www-education.rec.ri.cmu.edu/robotc/

Here is some LEGO NXT Mindstorms links that I use every now and then:

The Nxt Step (blog) http://thenxtstep.blogspot.com/

Lego Education http://www.legoeducation.info/nxt/

WIKI about Mindstorms http://www.nxt-mindstorms.com

Another cool NXT blog http://www.nxtasy.org/

All in all the kit is so cool and I expect to use it for many many hours.

Benjamin Sølberg Lego Mindstorms NXT