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                                                                                     Foreword









                         When Building Robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS was finished I felt very satisfied,
                         but completely exhausted. I had been working on the book three to four hours a day
                         — every day — for more than five months, dedicating to it all of my spare time and
                         stealing some additional time from my job and my family. My most recurring
                         thought was:“This has been an incredible opportunity, I’m so glad I did it” immedi-
                         ately followed by “but I’ll never do it again”.
                            The months that followed were incredibly exciting.Although the memory of the
                         hard work was still fresh in my mind, it was more than compensated for by the
                         incredible reception that the book received from MINDSTORMS fans. In term of
                         sales — of course — but also in terms of the flattering reviews and very positive
                         comments that many readers expressed directly to me by e-mail.
                            When Syngress offered me the opportunity to write a second book, I had mixed
                         feelings. On the one hand, I was so proud of the welcome the first book had
                         received that I was tempted to accept; on the other hand, I really didn’t feel ready to
                         repeat the effort required to write the first book. More importantly, I didn’t want to
                         write a book just to write another book, with nothing special in it. Building Robots
                         with LEGO MINDSTORMS filled a gap in the technical literature about LEGO
                         robotics that had been empty, but the number of books devoted to the LEGO
                         MINDSTORMS system was already rather high before its publication, and many
                         other good titles have been released on the topic since then.
                            Discussing ideas and possibilities with the Syngress staff, the concept for a new
                         book slowly began to evolve. Building Robots with LEGO MINDSTORMS explains
                         scores of techniques about designing and building robots, describing about thirty
                         complete projects and offers suggestions for many others. However, it contains no
                         explanation of these projects with the level of detail to where everybody can repro-
                         duce a specific robot, following step-by-step instructions.This fact has been pointed

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