There never seems to be any shortage of creativity or innovation when it comes to making things out of legos. Seriously, just take a look at this fully functional lego pinball machine. The pictures and video are pretty damn impressive, although the picture with the little lego guy looking like he’s helping to build it is icing on the cake. Abandon all hope ye do it yourselfers who enter here, though. This pinball machine took over 8000 lego pieces to create and is powered by six NXT robots, nine touch sensors, 10 light sensors, and full motors.
That takes me off the list of potential individuals who would be able to recreate something like this. They certainly did cover all their bases in terms of features with this powerful gaming monstrosity. This pinball machine was created from a similar machine built by Gerrit Bronsveld and Martijin Boogarts (I’ll be honest I have no idea who these people are). It was a pretty small team that put together the machine too, including Mark Gryn from the University of Windsor (School of Computer Science…didn’t see that one coming, did ya?) and an 11th grade student who was participating int he co-op program at the school.
The entire thing is made of lego pieces, with the exception of the ball. The programming was done using the NXT-G programming language which was provided by Lego. Looking at the video of the gameplay, it looks like a lot of fun, but I think they might need a slicker surface for the ball to roll around on. The ball just doesn’t seem to move fast enough to really bounce around a lot or slam into the appropriate targets. Alternatively they could make the paddles more powerful as well to give the ball a bit more oomph. Hopefully not so much that we start seeing lego pieces flying everywhere, but you get the idea, right? This machine reminds me of the Pacman Lego Arcade game and the Tetris playing robot, only combining the gaming aspect of the arcade game with the robotics aspect of the tetris bot. Very cool.
Via: Gizmo Watch
