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I had my old RIS 1.5 Mindstorms lying around and it had been built using the Ultimate Builders Kit to be a table sweeper with tracks. I liked the track configuration and I thought I could update it to use the NXT and the NXT motors. I didn’t want to do the table sweeper thing again, so it occurred to me to use a spring loaded shooter from Dominic’s dinosaur iron predator and try to make it fire using the third NXT motor. You can see the results below. It works quite well.

Also, I’m not a fan of the visual programing interface that comes with the NXT, I’d much rather write C code (old habits die hard). Just recently NXC (Not eXactly C) has entered advanced beta and has documentation. I used it in conjunction with the Brixcc IDE running under XP in parallels and it worked great! So far I have a very simple program that causes the robot to shoot if the sound sensor detects a loud sound like a clap. It does it by moving the 3rd motor for 1 second and then moving it back once the shot is fired. Next on the to do is to write a roaming program that uses the ultrasound to randomly move around the house.