Recently the Dublin Robotics Boosters held a yard sale to sell LEGO robotics parts from previous seasons. If you came and purchased a kit, extra parts, or LEGO pieces – thank you for supporting robotics in Dublin! To thank you, we’ve assembled a few resources to help you get started with your new LEGO robotics kits, we’ve assembled a few resources for you.
LEGO officially stopped supporting NXT in 2015 after they released the next generation LEGO Mindstorms system called EV3, which has since been replaced by Spike Prime. However, that doesn’t mean they are obsolete. They are still great for building fun, functional robots using the NXT brain (the intelligent brick), NXT motors, NXT sensors, and some LEGO Technic pieces.
Learn how to build and program your NXT robot with a World Championships robotics team
The Dublin high school team, Bad Robots, has volunteered to teach you how to build and program your robot. Come hang out at Coffman High School and build your LEGO robot with the team that made it to the FIRST Robotics World Championship last season. We don’t have a date finalized yet, so sign up below to be notified when we figure out the available dates and times.
Sign up for the free build-a-bot class
Get software for programming your NXT Intelligent Brick
Your NXT brick is the brains of your robot and it can be programmed to control motors, get input from sensors, make sounds, or update the LCD screen. Although LEGO hasn’t updated the NXT programming software since 2013, it still works today. It’s available for Windows and Mac, though it seems the Mac version isn’t installable on the latest MacOS.
NXT Software: Windows (works perfectly)
NXT Software: Mac (doesn’t work for us, but it’s the latest download available)
Join a FIRST LEGO League Robotics Team
Enjoying your LEGO Robotics experience so far? Sign up to join a Dublin FLL team and build robots with some new friends! Zero experience required, but everything you may have learned using your NXT robot will give you a head start working with the latest SPIKE Prime kits. Registration ends on September 30th, so sign up now. FLL is for grades 4-8, but if you’re in high school, you can register soon for this season – come back soon for more details.
Friendly competition is at the heart of FLL Challenge, as teams of students grades 4-8 engage in research, problem-solving, coding, and engineering – building and programming a LEGO® Education SPIKE™ Prime robot that navigates the missions of a robot game. They also participate in a research project to identify and solve a relevant real-world problem.
Watch this video from FIRST about FLL to learn more about this world-wide program.
You can register for a FIRST LEGO League team in the Dublin City Schools district here. Teams are forming now, and we anticipate registration will end mid-September. For more information about FLL in Dublin, contact the VPs of FLL, Dublin Robotics Boosters.
Complete your NXT Mindstorms kit
Whether you need to add an extra wire, replace a missing component, or get an assortment of beams, gears, axels, wheels, pins, or treads, we’ve got you covered. There are a ton of options out there, especially on Amazon, but we’ve collected two sets of pieces you may want to consider for your next robot project. If you explore some other options, “technic compatible” or other ways of saying it’s not officially LEGO brand is perfectly fine. Note, we have no affiliation with the sellers of the below products and cannot specifically vouch for them.
Coming soon (sorry, we were too busying sorting LEGOs for the yard sale):
wires, sensors, motors, chargers