NXT Forklift



This NXT Forklift project was designed to take advantage of the cool Bluetooth Vehicle Remote program for PC keyboards by Anders Søborg. Using this program you can drive around and operate the lift by wireless remote control from your PC keyboard. You can also program autonomous tasks as shown in the sample "Forklift Test" program, which uses the ultrasonic sensor to find the platform to place the load on.

The Forklift is buildable by a single NXT retail set (plus one piece of string), but just barely. I had to redesign it several times to free up beams and pegs in order to finish it. It is based on the same 3-motor Chassis as the Hammer Car project.

Here is a video of the Forklift in action:


Comments

Anonymous said…
I wish there where biogger ones...
On my vacationjob, I crashed mine into the top of the gate...
wow its nice to know you finnaly are doing this. I rememeber a few months ago when I mentioned you should build this and you said its on your list of things to build. I am definately going to build this one soon.
Anonymous said…
OK. It is cool project.

But there is a little fault of the control program.

The program has not the "Keep Alive" function and the robot turn off by it's own setting on running.

If it is fixed, the program will be perfect.
Brian Davis said…
Actually, the lack of a "Keep Alive" block might have been on purpose - not a fault, but a different design goal. After all, particularly with two NXT units (the control and the robot), there might be plenty of times you run off to dinner or something and forget to turn one or both off. This way, they will still shut off to save the batteries, with very little downside.

Still if this bothers you, *you* (or anyone else) can fix it yourself very easily. Drop a "Keep Alive" block into the code, or somewhat more sophisticated approach, only execute the "Keep Alive" block when a new command comes in from the control unit (and of course only have the control unit send commands when they are changed, not "as often as possible"). The result would be a system that turns itself off if it isn't actively played with... just like the original behavior of the NXT itself.

--
Brian Davis
Anonymous said…
Thanks your advise, brian.
I understand and agree your post.

But... the "control program" I said is... PC remote control program made by Anders Søborg.
Not the NXT-G program.

I dont hack the program.. but wish fix it as soon...
Anders Søborg said…
What a great robot. Good job Dave. "Keep Alive" can be set on the NXT brick manually using menu - look under settings and sleep - set this to never.
Anders
Dave Parker said…
In this case, the remote control is PC to NXT, and the NXT is not running a program (the firmware accepts and executes the Bluetooth instructions directly), so you can't add your own Keep Alive block. I also doubt there is anything the PC control program can do about it. I do consider it a bug in the firmware that it doesn't reset the sleep timer when it executes Bluetooth instructions directly, but the good news is that it's easy to manually set the Keep Alive on the brick as Anders says.

Popular Posts