Of Legos and Fridays

It was Friday night, 7:30 pm, didn't really have a party to go to nor was in any mood to work or go to the gym after 3 hours of meetings. It was raining heavily outside and there was no one else in the lab. Felt really bored. Thats when I remembered something. My cubicle neighbhour had recently got a Lego Mindstorm set for Mentoring school kids next fall. I've always loved Lego Mindstorms, it has and will always be my dream birthday present. The nerd/child/self-obsessed-engineer in me will always make sure I will spend hours working under a lampshade making some new creation. And the beauty of Lego Mindstorms is that, it is somewhat like Windows, it is meant for people who don't want to tinker around with settings and innards and just want to whip something up real quick. But how it differs is that if you DO require to tinker, you can start interfacing python code or C code to create ever complicated robots. So when he gave me the license to play with the toys over the weekend, I couldn't resist.. So I spent about 2.5 hours pouring over the instruction manual and constructing the robots, and loading the programs. I wanted to do more, but the fear that there would be nothing left to do if I finished everything in 1 day, there would be nothing left to do later, kept my enthusiasm at bay. Here are some videos:

Who needs a social life when you have THIS!!!

Berhael