Eric Sophie (Legomaster on Brickshelf) has posted some pictures of his latest creation.  So far its just called the red quad (for obvious reasons). but it looks quite impressive.  No word yet on its range of motion, and its still a work in progress so it may not be finalized, however from the sheer number of gears sticking out of it, we'd excpect it can at least walk around, as well as move its head in some fashion.  It looks like its only got one NXT so it probaly won't be able to do much more than that, but you never know.  Ohh and Eric gets extra geek points for having Star Trek on in the backround of his Lego build.  Check out the whole Brickshelf gallery.

» Read more: Red-Quad

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A few weeks ago we posted a video showing Honda's Asimo bot falling down while trying to climb a flight of stairs.  Well at CES this year Honda showed off the grandaddy of all bots again, and this time he not only successfully walked up and down stairs (albiet without the cocky I'm not looking head turn) but he also ran across the stage.  While you might think running is easy as pie, for a robot its increidbly difficult to do.  To run a bot (or a person) needs to have both feet off the ground at the same time.  This requires a tremendous amount of force, as well as excellent balance.  The video is quite impressive, check it out.

» Read more: Asimo can walk up stairs!

A couple of more pictures have popped up of the new Technic sets on Brickshelf.  We had an article a few days ago with pictures of the box-art However these are from the French Toy Fair 2007 and show the actual models, not just the box art.  The bulldozer is quite massive.  Which will make it a great model to build and play with, its also likely to make it quite expensive, especialy with those fancy electronics.  The combine looks like it would be a much more managable (read: cheaper)size.  There are also some nice pictures of the new Ferrari 599 GTB Fiorana 1:10 scale model.  While it looks like it will be a great model, it loks more pretty than functional.  Check out the gallery on Brickshelf.

» Read more: More pics of the New Technic Sets

One of the first things I did when I first got back into Legos was to build a mosiac of Mickey Mouse.  Sadly I don't have any pictures of this, however I do remeber it being fairly difficult to do even with a fairly small mosaic.  I used a full sized printout of Mickey and just tried to eyeball it.  It turned out suprisingly well, but it certinly could have been much improved.  Two German computer science students have developed a program to make building mosaics out of Legos (or other materials for that matter) even easier.  Called PicToBrick it takes an inputted image and spits out a image of what the final build will look like, a bill of materials and even building instructions.  It even has a stability obtimizer for making side view Lego mosaics.  This should making building any mosaic from a small little cartoon, to a large wall painting very easy.  Well at least the design part, putting down thousands of little 1×1 bricks is never easy.  Check it out over on there website, they even have a nice little Mosaic Gallery.

» Read more: PicToBrick

The Crawler Crane is a great Lego Technic model.  I finally got around to putting mine together and am quite impressed with the results.  Not only does the kit have all sorts of useful bits for the NXT, the included instructiosn build a great crane.  Its quite tall, and has a decent lift capacity.  Even better if you use a couple of the extra beams to move the counterweights farther back.  Its got some great ideas for unusual ways to use some of the Lego parts, including useing the rubber axle joiner as a sort of ratchet to hold the cranes load up.  I would highly recommend this model, check out some more pictures in the gallery.

» Read more: Crawler Crane Built

The NBC Betas keep on coming at a fantastic pace.  Version 1.01b22 is now avalilble over at the Bricxcc sourceforge page.  Its great to see the folks over there working so hard on this project, we just hope they aren't working so hard that they get burnt out and abandon the project.  New in this release:

• Adds support in NXC switch statements for strings, constant expressions, character constants, and the true and false keywords
• Adds support in NBC for strings delimited by double quote characters
• Fixes several motor macros in NBC/NXC so that they reset the block count before executing when it is appropriate for them to do so
• Fixes NXC ForceOff macro in NXCDefs.h
• Fixes the RotateMotor/RotateMotorEx macros so that programs no longer hang when the angle is set to zero
• Fixes a problem in expressions which were not properly setting the zero flag register variable if in a sub-expression it had already been set

Check it out over at the site.

» Read more: New NBC Beta

Steven Hassenplug (of the aptly named Team Hassenplug) has put together a wonderful matrix comparing the various NXT software out there.  There are actualy two matrixes, one comparing all eight different programming software, and another comparing the other eight off-brick controlling software.  The matrix is not yet complete, however they plan on adding a couple of performance based tests including speed, memory and time to write. Check it out over at the Team Hassenplug site.

» Read more: NXT Programming Software Matrix