Lego Lasers
Published on 2 Apr 2007 at 11:47 pm.
1 Comment.
Filed under Inventions, Lego, NXT, Research, Robotics, Solutions.
Well, I must admit that it didn’t take long for my interest in robots to be united with my interest in lasers. Two great tastes that go great together! Why indeed should my robots be defenseless against those that might wish them harm? Clearly, a Lego Laser is called for.
In all seriousness, it occurred to me one day last December while shining my 35 mW Wicked Laser that I could scan a tree in winter and reconstruct a three dimensional image of it. This is actually a useful idea since Earth Scientists are currently very eager to quantify the Earth’s carbon cycle. A great deal of CO2 ends up locked up in plants, especially trees. So there are researchers engaged in trying to quantify the mass of a tree, so that they can get an idea of how much carbon has been taken up by the tree. The way they typically do this is to measure the trunk diameter and the height, and then cut the tree down and find its mass by weighing it. One can then work out the correlation between trunk diameter and tree height and the tree’s mass for a given species. You then of course, have to do this for every species. Now to find the mass of a forest, you then have to go in and measure the trunk diameters and tree heights to get the mass of the forest. (This of course neglects the roots, for which you can come up with correction factors). The other possibility is to use LIDAR and map the forest. But LIDAR is expensive. So a little Lego Laser scanner might be a useful prototype for doing Earth Science research.
So I now have a few laser pointers that I am prepared to disassemble and mount onto Lego bricks. But before I got started, I decided to check out what others have done. Here are some useful links:
Laser Target Finder Sensor by Philo Hurbain, which combines a laser with a light sensor so that the robot can find targets identified by laser.
NXT Laser Hack by Kevin Cook, which allows you to replace the photodiode in the official Lego Light Sensor with a laser from a laser pointer.
Lego 3D Laser Digitizer by Rama Hoetzlein, which is similar in concept to the Laser Scanner I am contemplating for tree modeling.
Tomorrow, I will try to get photos of my current laser scanner online.
I am also reading “Extreme NXT”, which I just purchased from Amazon (see below). In this book, which is co-authored by Philo Hurbain (the first link above), they describe how to connect LEDs to the NXT brick.
Please keep in mind that Lasers are not toys and can do real damage to your eyes if you shine it (intentionally or unintentionally) into your eyes. BE CAREFUL for yourself and others, and don’t blame me or the individuals above if you go and do something stupid and/or careless.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
Lego Insanity» Blog Archive » Lego Lasers on 3 Apr 2007 at 2:53 am: 1
[...] Read the original here: drknuth [...]