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LEGO Mindstorms Will Survive
thufir writes "LEGO has released a press release, where they dismiss the rumour that MINDSTORMS is being taken out of production. For some reason the changes in product policy lead to the misunderstanding that they would totally drop the product. 'Hearsay has it that a product range like LEGO MINDSTORMS is no longer in focus. This is not true. On the contrary, MINDSTORMS, CLIKITS and BIONICLE are all good examples of products the company wants to stake on.'" See our previous stories, Lego to Stop Producing Mindstorms and Lego Goes Back to the Basics.
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The Army reading list
Look for it here.
(Just try not to /. them too much)
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
Lego::RCX module.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
You obviously don't know that "stake" can mean to place a wager on.
A free Mind for Mindstorms and other robots is available in Forth, for when the Mindstorms robot has enough user-fillable RAM to load in the AI4U Mind.
pbForth has long been a Forth programming language available for the "brick" of the Lego Mindstorms.
An Aibo robot fan site features the JavaScript version of the free AI Mind.
AI4U: Mind-1.1 Programer's Manual is an alternative AI textbook that describes the Robot AI Mind in the 34 diagrams of 34 chapters corresponding to 34 mind-modules.
This clarification on the Lego website is a direct result of Slashdot. I read the original posting that Mindstorm may be discontinued and sent the article to my wife who is a primary organizer for the First Lego League here in Canada. She in turn sent it up the chain of command until it reached First in the US and then Lego. Lego responded with this clarification. So thank you Slashdot for providing the start of this process.
I was kinda hoping that in a couple of years, my daughter might be old enough for Mindstorms....so glad it's staying in production.
Oh, and one last time....the pluralization is LEGO!!! The product is LEGO. You play with LEGO. The company is LEGO. Americans are the only people on the planet who call is "Legos" or "Legoes".
-psy
The problem with the Mindstorms kit is that it has always relied on a few researchers output from MIT. The researchers used a (AFAICR) Microchip PIC with EEPROM to use as the CPU and an EPROM chip to store the single byte commands. There was also a smaller Mindstorms kit(can't remember the name) based on another MIT project called Crickets, which were smaller, with no LCD screen and only digital I/O. They are referenced on the linked page but the link is dead.
The PIC they used has 13 dual I/O pins and some others, even a basic Brick would take 4 pins for the lcd screen, 3 for the logic inputs. I think there are 2 A/D converters which are both used and a reset switch, oh, and the IR (it has IR, right?)
If they want the kind of things you ask, they need to upgrade the hardware, which they have never done. But with the latest chips they can easily get 4 ports (32 I/O pins) and a couple of A/D aswell. It will also have a new communication protocol allowing (essentially) less I/O lines for the memory and LCD and faster programming.
The radio communications is a bit different, WiFi is out I think, the power needed and the overspec of the transmission (a TCP/IP header would take up a lot of space on the chip).
The Bluetooth might be possible NOW, the communication is either by serial port (RCX 1.0) or USB (RCX 1.5/2.0?), all you should need to do is hack the software to use the port, its already set up to communicate in low-level code.
The language was ripped off from LOGO (perfect for a robot really) and is easy enough to upgrade..even using some of the other interpreters/languages written for the chip.
And yes, I did plan to make a clone, even down to rough schematics and language design. One problem with a clone is the accessories, the brick hardware is possible. The extra sensors are kind of tedious :( LEGO has the LEGO bricks as a common theme to make sensors easy, and they kept them simple (Was it anymore than a switch and a thermistor/resistor?)
Oh for simpler times, when real work didn't interrupt.
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