New LEGO MINDSTORMS!
GoRobotics writes “LEGO is finally rehauling it’s Mindstorms kit. At the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in early January, LEGO Group announced LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT, a new system that redefines the consumer robotics category which the company created in 1998. Robot Magazine has pictures and video. Press release here. My summary is here.“ Link to Robot magazine. Best feature? Download programs via Bluetooth! UPDATE: Wired has a preview of their cover story for next month about this [via] here.
Batman writes “Last Aptil, MIT created their very own 
Hunter is looking for some ideas for the discarded game gear he found, post up in the comments! – “My friend and I had an unusually lucky day and we got a lot of free electronics. Some of them working and some not. Here’s what we got: N64 – working, original playstation – working PS2 – works sometimes, Gameboy pocket – not working, gamecube – almost new condition and working and working we already have all of these so we were wondering if you would have any suggestions on how we could mod them or what we could make them into. it doesnt necessarily have to be all of them together. we were thinking about making the PS2 sphere but the PS2 doesnt work all the time and there isnt a step by step instruction on how to make the PS2 sphere.”
Here’s a great list of NES projects, we’ve covered some of them here on MAKE, but there are lots of project that are new (to me)…“Got one of those extra NESes lying around? Bored out of your mind? Well you’ve come to the right place to find out you can modify with your Nes, here is a list of links to things you could modify with your Nes.” Thanks knoppy44! 
Greg writes “Here is a line following robot that will follow a line, and at the end will stop for three seconds. After pausing for three seconds it will retrace its steps and drive in reverse. It is made with a sensing circuit, and H-bridge motorcontroller, and a microcontroller.” 
Make contributer Cy on creative uses for all that holiday trash – “Christmas, it’s inevitable, things will get discarded, broken, or ignored,” says Cy Tymony, a Torrance resident and author of Sneakier Uses for Everyday Things (the sequel to his Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things). “But why should things just go into a landfill?” In Tymony’s world, if you’ve got boxes, make boomerangs. Got milk? Make plastic.” 
Make your own LEGO blocks “…not everybody has access to their own CNC machine, but for those who do, here is a lesson in building up custom lego parts. This is not necessarily a design just for those of us lucky enough to own a CNC machine. A manual milling machine, or even hand tools and a great deal of patience will do the job. This post IS however directed at somebody who owns some sort of CNC milling machine, has access to some plastics and the tools appropriate to cut them, and somebody who is not a rank beginner at building lego robots.” [
