LEGO Mindstorms Masterpieces - Building and Programming Advanced Robots | Date: 30 April 2011, 05:07
|
When Building Robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS was finished I felt very satisfied,
but completely exhausted. I had been working on the book three to four hours a day
— every day — for more than five months, dedicating to it all of my spare time and
stealing some additional time from my job and my family. My most recurring
thought was: “This has been an incredible opportunity, I’m so glad I did it” immediately
followed by “but I’ll never do it again”.
The months that followed were incredibly exciting. Although the memory of the
hard work was still fresh in my mind, it was more than compensated for by the
incredible reception that the book received from MINDSTORMS fans. In term of
sales — of course — but also in terms of the flattering reviews and very positive
comments that many readers expressed directly to me by e-mail.
When Syngress offered me the opportunity to write a second book, I had mixed
feelings. On the one hand, I was so proud of the welcome the first book had
received that I was tempted to accept; on the other hand, I really didn’t feel ready to
repeat the effort required to write the first book. More importantly, I didn’t want to
write a book just to write another book, with nothing special in it. Building Robots
with LEGO MINDSTORMS filled a gap in the technical literature about LEGO
robotics that had been empty, but the number of books devoted to the LEGO
MINDSTORMS system was already rather high before its publication, and many
other good titles have been released on the topic since then.
Discussing ideas and possibilities with the Syngress staff, the concept for a new
book slowly began to evolve. Building Robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS explains
scores of techniques about designing and building robots, describing about thirty
complete projects and offers suggestions for many others. However, it contains no
explanation of these projects with the level of detail to where everybody can reproduce
a specific robot, following step-by-step instructions.This fact has been pointed
xvii
out by some readers, who said they would have appreciated a book describing challenging
projects, each looked at in great detail.
Actually, the shelves of many bookshops offer many excellent books containing
step-by-step instructions for building LEGO MINDSTORMS robots. Nevertheless,
if you look carefully you will discover that some of these books are aimed at introducing
the reader to the basics of the MINDSTORMS world, therefore describing
only very simple robots. On the other hand, there exists a second group of books
that show step-by-step instructions, but lack substantially detailed explanations about
the building techniques used by the authors and the general concepts that are fundamental
to the projects.
These reflections are the foundation of LEGO MINDSTORMS Masterpieces,
whose goal is presenting some very sophisticated projects with the maximum level of
detail. In the book you hold in your hands you will find not only high quality stepby-
step instructions for building all of the robots, but also a complete description for
each of them, including goals, building techniques, programming techniques, and the
theory supporting the designer’s choices.
In my opinion what makes LEGO MINDSTORMS Masterpieces really special is
the fact that it is not the work of a single person, but rather the result of the cooperation
of a team of authors.The fact is that any designer tends to adopt his or her
own building “cliches”, a collection of standard solutions to common problems that
they use again and again to save design time.This isn’t laziness, but rather the normal
behavior of the human mind.When faced with a new problem, the first solutions
that come to mind are solutions that have already been successful in similar (but perhaps
not identical) cases. Additionally, every designer has their own personal style, a
set of unexpressed rules that guide building choices toward something that the
designer prefers to use, even if another solution exists that would work equally as
well or better. For these reasons different creations built by the same person typically
show many similarities; a sort of common background that results in what can be
thought of as a “family resemblance” among their designs.
The MINDSTORMS Masters that wrote this book brought to it a wide variety
of ideas and a wealth of strategies that a single author could simply never hope to
offer.This diversity is exactly what we are offering in this book, which we called —
with a bit of immodesty — LEGO MINDSTORMS Masterpieces.Whether these creations
could be considered real masterpieces is not for me to say, but what I am sure
of is that we devoted a considerable amount of time to choosing and presenting projects
that push the possibilities of the MINDSTORMS RIS system towards its limits,
www.syngress
PassWord: No
|
DISCLAIMER:
This site does not store LEGO Mindstorms Masterpieces - Building and Programming Advanced Robots on its server. We only index and link to LEGO Mindstorms Masterpieces - Building and Programming Advanced Robots provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete LEGO Mindstorms Masterpieces - Building and Programming Advanced Robots if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
|
 |
|
![[HF] 10 Cool LEGO Mindstorms: Dark Side Robots, Transports, and Creatures](http://i04.s2.imagehosting.ws/2010-11-12/11631/2qvxjd1.jpg)
Comments (0)
All
