Our friend John Baichtal is headlining a new column over at MAKE called “The Monday Jolt”, devoted to the topic of electronics and microcontrollers every monday. The first post in this series covers the Bricktronics shield, which was developed by Matt and Adam of Wayne and Layne. John writes:

Lego Mindstorms NXT is a fantastic educational robotics set that teaches kids and adults skills ranging from engineering to programming. Nevertheless, wouldn’t it be cool to enhance those Lego robots with Arduino boards and shields? With that thought in mind, Adam Wolf, Matthew Beckler, and I wrote Make: Lego and Arduino Projects and developed the Bricktronics shield to interface the two.

Adam and Matthew, who run the electronic kit business Wayne and Layne, tackled the challenge of making the shield. They reverse engineered Mindstorms’ protocols, had custom parts molded overseas, prototyped circuits, and developed an Arduino library for controlling the shield. The book explains how to build some fun Lego models as well, including a chocolate milk drinkbot and a keytar synth.

I’m looking forward to seeing more cool stuff in this column every week — this is a great start!