In 1992, Danny’s creation “Tom the cat” was early discarded from a LEGO competition held in a toy store in his town. He kept playing well, until his dark-age-of-LEGO. Then, in 2003 he discovered LEGO MINDSTORMS. In 2009, he got a MSc degree cum laude in Robotics from the University of Siena.
In 2006, he was selected by The LEGO Company for the MINDSTORMS DEVELOPER PROGRAM, as a member of a team of enthusiast and experts to help the company with the testing, development, and promotion of the NXT product. Since 2007, he is a LEGO MINDSTORMS COMMUNITY PARTNER, continuing to work in this role of interface between LEGO Company and the community. In 2009, he got a MSc degree cum laude in robotics engineering, and worked as researcher about mobile robotics.
In 2011 he started his activity as teacher, and free-lance LEGO designer and inventor. Since 2007, he partecipated to many events (Italy, Luxembourg, Nederlands, Denmark, Spain, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Barhein, Saudi Arabia) and his creations were featured in many TV shows (Italy, Germany, Sweden, Japan, USA).
In 2012 he worked as external programmer for LEGO Education, to help developing the software for the models of the LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Education sets. Since 2012, he is a member of the LEGO MINDSTORMS EXPERT PANEL, a team of 12 experts that helped LEGO Company in the testing and development of the new MINDSTORMS EV3 product. In Fall 2013 a, he travelled the United States to show Cyclops (mk3) and LEGONARDO to thousands of K14 students. In summer 2014, he travelled the United States to show his robots and train teachers.
Among his world-famous robots you should not miss JOHNXT, a replica of Johnny 5 robot from Short Circuit movie; the LEGO RUBIK UTOPIA, the first NXT Rubik’s cube solving robot ever made; LEGONARDO the portrayer robot, that can draw smoothly like a real artist; CYCLOPS, a MINDSTORMS-Android-hybrid humanoid robot that can walk, gesticulate, talk and listen in natural language. CYCLOPS can be even remote controlled with a wearable LEGO exoskeleton.
Daniele works as a freelance LEGO designer , making models on commission for international education companies that hold summer camps, extra-scholastic courses and laboratories (Bricks4Kidz, BrainVyne, Create & Learn and others). For international companies and research institutions (Elettric80, CEA LIST, Hermes Reply, ABB Robotics, GRANTEK, THOR, PwC) he realized detailed working scale models of automatic industrial plants: LEGO Car Factory (for CEA LIST, 2015), a desktop scale model of a car factory, used as a test bench for the Papyrus software; LEGO Car Factory (for Hermes Reply, 2016); a set of LEGO peripherals to integrate with a real PLC and robot in a robotic cell model that simulates the metal stamping process (ABB Robotics, 2016). Check them out on his YouTube Channel.
Danny wrote five books about LEGO MINDSTORMS:
- Creating Cool LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Robots (Apress, 2008) features JohnNXT, a replica of the Short Circuit movies robot star Johnny 5;
- LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Thinking Robots (No Starch Press, 2009) includes full building instructions for a streamlined version of his famous Rubik’s cube solver, the LEGO Rubik Utopia;
- The LEGO MINDSTORMS EV3 Laboratory (No Starch Press, 2013) describes how to build and program robots built with the EV3 retail kit 31313, and includes the comic adventure The EV3L Scientist’s Apprentice. It sold over 20000 copies, and it has been translated in German, Polish, Traditional Chinese, Korean (pending), and Simplified Chinese (pending).
- The LEGO BOOST Activity Book (No Starch Press, 2019) introduces robotics to young kids using the amazing LEGO BOOST Creative Toolbox 17101.
- The LEGO MINDSTORMS Robot Inventor Activity Book (No Starch Press, 2021) is full of non-geeky fun projects such as a car that can transform into a biped robot, a guitar that you can play for real, a pinball game, an arcade game, and more! By reading it, readers will learn how to program robots in Scratch 3.