Details: While mulling over the thought of trying to put together a boat for a LEGO boat race (an increasingly popular challenge at Adult Fan of LEGO gatherings), it occurred to me that using the off-the-shelf remote controls wouldn't be terribly effective due to light distortion near the water's surface. The obvious solution is to use bluetooth instead, and devise some sort of remote control to steer the boat. Here's a spectacular implementation of that idea. Two small propellers steer the boat, and the motors are safely on board the boat (which is the only way I'd recommend trying to build something like this, although I understand some builders have had luck with risking their motors and other electronic parts touching the water). This design actually changes the angle of both propellers to steer - a nice trick I wouldn't have thought of.
Details: So far I've mostly focused on hardware for Robotics Monday, but good LEGO® software is important too. The LEGO Group has been great about making drivers and such available so that programmers can easily create custom mindstorms based programs. This particular example is similar to the "Remote Control" that was released for the RCX a few years back, but this one makes use of LEGO® MINDSTORMS NXT's bluetooth capabilities to provide a bit more functionality and reliability. The link above has files you can download to add this functionality to your bluetooth-enabled device and even includes source code if you want to "build" your own.
remotely through BlueTooth.
