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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.
I must say this is a relief... My first child is being born in a few months and I was afraid I'd have to start stashing away Mindstorm kits... It would have been like 'New-Coke' all over again ;-)
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My Masters Program (no joke) has a project wherein we have to develop a minesweeper program using mindstorm. Other than the fact that BrickOS hasn't been updated since 2001, I was worried somewhat that I would be using a non-functional toy from here on out.
Hmm....any other projects that work with Mindstorm that I should be aware of?
Joe
It's pretty cool. Basically, it's a microprocessor with some snap on sensors and motors. You then have the option of programming it with the included visual programming language, or you can use one of a miriad of more advanced languages availible.
Back when it first came out, my Dad and I competed in a sumo cometition held at his work. It was really fun as a high scholl student to be able to play around with robotics and see how changes in code can affect the behavior of the system.
"That's not ironic, it's just mean!" - Bender
I was bought my Mindstorms kit a couple of years ago as a birthday gift. Recently I've been looking to upgrade it but all the add-on kits seem to have disappeared. The Ultimate Accessories Set, the Ultimate Builders Set, the Dark Side Set and the Mars Explorer Set have all vanished.
/. post regarding Mindstorms I assumed that was the reason. Now they've said they're not stopping Mindstorms why have these other sets disappeared and is there any other way you can you get the extra sensors these sets provides?
The Lego shop doesn't list any of them other than the base set. People like Amazon list them but can't say when they will have any stock. They do seem to have vanished from the face of the net. I have managed to get a Mars Explorer set half price which suggests it's end of line. The only place I can get anything is BrickLink and at a price.
When I saw the original
... do they really want to keep the bionicle products? Maybe they're doing a good thing by involving more girls into building toys by keeping the clikits. Boys need bricks and stuff that allows them to be creative. They don't need 200 bionicle sets that still doesn't allow them to build a house. Where are the good old days that lego was selling boxes that had about 5 designs, and enough pieces that allowed you to plenty more designs of your own. I'm amazed that the bionicle products are profitable. After I bought one, I promised never to buy one ever again, as it didn't give me a better collection of bricks that allowed me to do more fun projects. (Note that the mindstorms set was great as there are over 700 regular technic building pieces in that one)
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
The older castle sets did kick ass. I remember salivating over the Sears Wishlist Catalogue for hours while looking at the medieval and sci fi Lego back in the mid 80's. The castles then were bigger and more complex as I remember. My one grudge was that every 1 or 2 years there seemed to be a completely new series and the old stuff was impossible to find all of a sudden...
(I submitted this for a /. poll a few days BEFORE the first Lego stories broke about cancelling certain product lines.)
At what point did the introduction of increasingly sophisticated and purpose-built Lego pieces diminish the creative aspects of Lego construction?
1961: First lego wheels
1964: First Lego sets to include specific building instructions
1974: Large-scale "maxi-figs" (solid bodies, poseable arms, heads w/ faces)
1978: Town sets with mini-figures, trees, signage (gas, fire station, etc)
1984: Knights, armor, swords, horses, wagon wheels, banners
1988: Pirates, cannons, tree trunks and leaves, pirate flags, alligators
1995: Aquazone, scuba gear, squids, painted canopies w/ sea-monster faces
2000-present: Bionicles, Star Wars, Spider Man, and Harry Potter sets
Another point in time? Actually, I'm not as interested in the date itself as much as the sequence of brick releases.
'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.'
Wait......they aren't going to take down Mindstorms, but then they say right there that Mindstorms is a product they want to stake on. That's the most confusing thing I've heard all day.
...they really should update it. It's been over four years since Mindstorms first came out, and Lego still hasn't made any significant changes or upgrades to it. It really is an excellent learning/building tool, but there are many limitations to the RCX. A newer model, say, RCX 3.0, with increased processing capabilites, more ram/rom, and possibly even Wifi or Bluetooth instead of IR would be terrific.
eclecti.cc
Awhile ago I was looking around for methods to solve the Rubik's Cube. I came upon this guy who created a cube solver entirely out of mindsorms. Complete with color recognotion camera. Pretty nifty if you ask me..
I couldn't find any way to contact anyone at Lego by email - just through customer service. It would be nice to send an email of encouragement directly to the management.
The RCX Brick and a few other Lego bits are the heart of my 3D Scanner project.
I need to set up NQC or LegOs for the next phase, and I need a good way to control the camera.
Dang. Not enough hours in the day.
What were you expecting?
Little girls play with legos more than boys do now. My daughter (9 yr) brought into school all of my old legos from my mothers house because she said they were running out of them to use in her classroom. Aparently it's all the girls in the class who play legos at recess while the boys sit there and play their video games.
While i didn't buy her any regular lego sets, she did get several sets of clikits. If they had some simple, fairly inexpensive lego kits that allowed for girls to make simple houses, malls, in all pastelly girl colors lego would take off again.
At this point, girls generally have much more imagination and ability to sit down and play and build things. The key is breaking away from the theme based movie/fantasy themes and focus on what girls like, dolls, play houses, etc.
I see everyone here complaining about the overabundance of specialized pieces. Have any of you gone down to wal-mart and LOOKED at the lego sets available. Yes, the dumb Harry Potter sets are there. Yes, the dumb NBA sets are there. Yes, the excellent Designer Series sets are there... WHAT'S THAT?! Excellent Designer Sets... I've never heard of them! Robots, Motor, Wind-up, Creatures... The Robots set comes with instructions for 49 different models and the pieces are excelent for making thousands more. Go look at what is available out there people.
With today's watches having USB 2.0, 256 Meg storage and running linux, why does the MindStorm still have only 4 inputs/outputs, no real wireless connection and no real CPU/memory?
:-( which really limits it's usefullness for let's say boats, trucks or other stuff.
And why is:
The RC together with a battery compartment? Would it be much better to have them separeted so you can stick the batteries at the bottom, the screen at the top (point of mass lower)
nd their radiocontrolled car has a receiver that is not very compact (and molde together with the batteries again
In addition, having some more different gears would be greta, because chaining too much gears in lego is not something which works good, so reducing the gears neccessarry wouldbe a cool thing.
And finally make some bricks with LED lights in them! And some more different sized cables! Or how about a brick-plate (2x10 and 2x2 or something) with metal strips in it, so that you can save the cables and just join the bricks?
All these changes are very cheap ( heh, its just some plastic) and compare this to the trillion new parts they made for starwars and harry potter etc. But the small changes would make Lego _much_ more usefull for robotics and RC models.
Dont get me wrong, I love this stuff. This is why I care for it...
Best wishes,
Tels
For example, the average Logo program assumes that the turtle has enough capability to turn 90 degrees then drive forward 15 units. That, in actual robotic terms, is quite a feat. You have to implement a well-clocked motion base with many sensors and motors before that would really happen. And then you're stuck with that specific motion-base on which you could try other robotics methods.
In contrast, Mindstorms goes to the atomic features that can implement any sort of robotics base: the core actuators and sensors which could implement a turtle-like motion-base (though the base kit wouldn't have enough to make a generalized turtle), but can also implement many other non-turtle motion projects like arms, dollies, winches and walkers.
There's nothing in the LOGO language which couldn't also drive those projects, but then the nature of the programs would be much more like RCX than LOGO. Instead of "turn 90", you'd have "turn until sensor 3 trips." The level of abstraction is just too low for what LOGO was best designed to teach and demonstrate.
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