{"id":1335,"date":"2012-01-22T06:12:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-21T22:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/?p=1335"},"modified":"2012-05-01T04:23:21","modified_gmt":"2012-04-30T20:23:21","slug":"lego-mindstorms-nxt-alpha-rex-building-instructions-plan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/2012\/01\/22\/lego-mindstorms-nxt-alpha-rex-building-instructions-plan\/","title":{"rendered":"LEGO Mindstorms NXT Alpha Rex building instructions \/ plan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 Alpha Rex<\/p><\/div>\n

I bought the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0<\/a> recently and was a bit disappointed to find that it didn’t come with printed instructions to build Alpha Rex – the robot on the box art. I searched for the instructions all over the web but couldn’t find them. The building instructions are available from within the Mindstorms software as a kind of Flash animation (I think). I don’t use MS software (all PCs Ubuntu<\/a> at the moment), but recently acquired a ‘WorkAtHome’ licence for an ill-conceived project at work that depends on Excel. I looked through the installed files to see if there was any content in an accessible format but again found nothing useful.<\/p>\n

The file below is one screenshot per page of the LEGO Mindstorms software running on a Win7 guest on VirtualBox<\/a> on Ubuntu. I used Shutter from http:\/\/shutter-project.org\/<\/a> (install Shutter from your Ubuntu repository with this APT link<\/a>) to take the pain out of capturing the first 73 screenshots. You can define a snapshot area with Shutter and ‘refresh’ the screenshot with Ctrl-F5 after clicking ‘Next’ in the Mindstorms software. Shutter creates a new file with the next screenshot in the series.<\/p>\n

My brain was blank when the time came to convert the set of images into a PDF, so I used gvim<\/a> to convert the ‘ls | cat’ list of file names into a LaTeX<\/a> file and XeTeX<\/a> to produce the PDF. Here’s a sample of the head of the AlphaRex.tex file:<\/p>\n

\\documentclass{article}\r\n\\usepackage[a4paper,landscape,top=0cm,bottom=0cm,left=0cm,right=0cm]{geometry}\r\n\\usepackage{graphicx}\r\n\\begin{document}\r\n  \\noindent\r\n  \\includegraphics[width=\\textwidth]{Selection_002.png}\r\n  \\includegraphics[width=\\textwidth]{Selection_003.png}\r\n  \\includegraphics[width=\\textwidth]{Selection_004.png}<\/pre>\n
And here’s the PDF – use either evince or Adobe Reader<\/a> to open it.<\/p>\n
AlphaRex.pdf<\/a> (8.4MB)<\/p>\n
Alpha Rex arms<\/a> (8.9MB)<\/p>\n
Alpha Rex head<\/a> (1.4MB)<\/p>\n
Alpha Rex colour sensor<\/a> (459kB)<\/p>\n
I expect there’s a copyright issue of some kind with providing this content. Hello! This is not my work. I copied the images from LEGO’s software which I obtained by buying the NXT 2.0 8547 set. Please do not attempt to send me money even if you believe I have helped you. I don’t want to be extradited to a country with psychotically oppressive copyright laws, communal prison showers and obese oversexed convicts. I am too old and too lightly built. And I haven’t finished building Alpha Rex. I will happily remove the PDF if someone can provide me with an URL for LEGO’s version of the Alpha Rex instructions. I’m a lifelong LEGO user and frankly a bit miffed that the only way I can access the media I thought I’d bought is by acquiring a MS product.<\/p>\n
OT: It was much quicker to create that PDF than it was to work out where to change my Apache<\/a>\/PHP<\/a> config so that WordPress<\/a> didn’t give me the ‘Maximum upload file size: 2MB’ (or 8MB) problem. The pages I found on the Web about this issue related mostly to people using WordPress on shared hosts: I use a comfortingly reliable Xen<\/a> VPS<\/a> from XenSmart<\/a>. I eventually found an Apache-specific config file here: \/etc\/php5\/apache2\/php.ini – simply increase the limit in upload_max_filesize and post_max_size somewhat larger. I see a lot of suggestions to have matching limits or even upload_max_filesize larger than post_max_size. That strikes me as odd, given RFC2388<\/a>. Am I missing something?<\/p>\n
Update 23rd January 2012<\/span><\/strong>: should have put a bit more effort into looking. The build instructions for the box art models have been screen-capped (I guess) and posted on DropBox – see this forum post:<\/p>\n
http:\/\/www.eurobricks.com\/forum\/index.php?showtopic=54141&view=findpost&p=1153643<\/a><\/p>\n
That archive also contains the program files for the NXT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I bought the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 recently and was a bit disappointed to find that it didn’t come with printed instructions to build Alpha Rex – the robot on the box art. I searched for the instructions all over the web but couldn’t find them. The building instructions are available from within the Mindstorms […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,20,64],"tags":[75],"class_list":["post-1335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-breaktime","category-fixed","category-useful","tag-lego"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1335"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1372,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1335\/revisions\/1372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lolyco.com\/sean\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}