Free Ride
Build an aerial tramway with a Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics kit and the MIT App Inventor web app, and control it remotely with an Android phone.
Control a Lego aerial tramway with an Android phone app
Lead Image © Marianne Oliva, 123RF.com
The Lego Mindstorms NXT and NXT 2.0 kits [1] contain software and hardware to create customizable, programmable robots. They include an intelligent brick computer, a set of sensors and motors, and Lego parts to build and support your creations. These kits have been out for about 10 years, and they are used in many schools and public libraries. We were able to find a used set for about $120, which allowed us to create an aerial tramway that transports a gondola from one station to another.
For this project, we did not need to program the Lego NXT brick. All the programming was done in the MIT App Inventor [2] web app using their Lego interface. The newer Lego Mindstorms EV3 [3] could also be used. In fact, for the MIT App Inventor interface, you will need to use the EV3 blocks instead of the NXT blocks.
Construction
To build the aerial tramway with stations and gondola, we used:
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