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Foreword

Japanese for Yoda) because I saw one of his fabulous grabber arms featured on
the LEGO MINDSTORMS Web site.
When Jonathan Babcock at Syngress first contacted me about working on
10 Cool LEGO MINDSTORMS Dark Side Robots, Transports, and Creatures,he
told me it was going to be a step-by-step building instruction book. I was
curious how we were going to lay out all the artwork for the book, and
Syngress didn’t initially have a firm plan on how this would be done. After
talking it out with Jonathan, it was decided that I would write some tools to
help do the job. Many tools had already been developed by others and given
away over the Internet for the LEGO community to share. I know that without
those tools this book would never have made it to press as polished and as
quickly as it has.
The groundwork for all the tools used was laid out by the late James
Jessiman. James created the LDraw program on which all the other tools are
based. MLCad, written by Michael Lachmann, is a second-generation computer
aided design (CAD) program that is used to enter robotic designs. The third
tool that we use is L3P, written by Lars C. Hassing. L3P converts LDraw files to
POV-Ray files. POV-Ray is the program that produces the final images that you
see in this book. POV-Ray has a long history of contributors. The Windows ver-
sion we used was coordinated by Chris Cason.
I wrote a program called LPub for this book that combines all these tools
together to generate the step-by-step construction images and the corresponding
part-list images. The development of LPub has been an adventure in and of
itself, and has kept me very busy over the past several months. I will be
cleaning it up, making it more robust, and making it available for all to use in
the near future.
I hope you enjoy building the robots in this book—some very creative
minds have done some amazing work inventing the robots you’ll find here. We
encourage you to use your own creativity to modify our designs after you’ve
built some of them, in the true LEGO building tradition.
If you like this book—and I think you will—be sure to look for two similar
books that Syngress will be putting out in the near future: 10 Cool LEGO
MINDSTORMS Robotics Invention System 2.0 Projects: Amazing Projects You
Can Build in Under an Hour (ISBN 1-931836-61-2) and 10 Cool LEGO MIND-
STORMS Ultimate Builders Projects: Amazing Projects You Can Build in Under
an Hour (ISBN 1-931836-60-4).

—Kevin L. Clague

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