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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 have a buddy I went to college with. Nice guy, very well spoken and everything. He's still single, and we're in our late twenties. I'm sure it has absolutely nothing to do with the several MindStorms "things" he has in various places in his house. I mean, they're cool, but jeezus, wait til you have one reeled in before you bust the Mindstorms out of the storage room.
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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not only do geeks in my former physics department write grant proposals to get lego mindstorms and then race them, they are actually an EXCELLENT toy for teens to learn to program, robotics, ... what the standard lego building blocks do for kids in the age range 3 - 8, mindostorms do in the dange 8 - 15 (clearly these numbers are not bounded on top): foster creativity! so... why drop an educational tool which has proven to be excellent. i guess lego knows what is good and what is not. what i hated with lego (as a big fan since i can remeber), is that in recent year there have been more and more specialized blocks which are useless and completely kill the main goal of lego: use your imagination to make a plane out of bricks. giving the kid a wing was a bad idea, IMHO, because kids then would be bored. after all, you got the wing out of the box, so why spend time trying to figure it out!
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)
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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...
Yeah, I built a little robot that kinda chased my kids around...that was all fine and good til he decided to Rage Against the Machine. There are still lego pieces in the fishtank.
Great product, glad to see it is still going.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
(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.
I was somewhat bemused when I read the previous press release, they can't be killing Mindstorms, I thought to myself. After all, of their entire range, Mindstorms is practically unique - the only cheap 'control system' experimentation kit for all ages. And yes, it is cheap, in the context of the alternatives.
Don't know about the bionicals thing though, I've never really looked into it.
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
Who said the robot didn't win :)
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Lego::RCX module.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
...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
Am I the only one who saw those Bionicle commercials the first time they came on and was like "WTF?". I was watching a mvoie on Cartoon Network I think and they kept showing these commercials for this Bionicle thing but they never explained what it WAS. Finally some months later I saw a comemrcial for LEGO Bionicle sets and figured out that that is what it was.
But who came up with this stupid idea? They created some really convoluted mythology that makes absolutely no sense to sell what amounts to lego action figures with some kind of tribal futuristic snowboarding theme.
If they really want to focus on their better products, they should have KEPT the harry potter and star trek sets and gotten rid of this nonsensical CRAP.
Oh and the problem with stuff like star trek sets and harry potter sets is not that they have a theme, but that they have all these specialized parts that are completely useless for anything else. The whole point of lego is to be able to build the set and then take it apart and come up with new stuff to build. But when stuff like an imerial fighter or whatever comes with huge fixed wings as a single solid peice that will never look like anyhting but an imperial fighter wing, (or whatever those ships are called) you can't exactly use the parts to build a truck instead.
Lego doesn't need to get rid of their specialty sets. They need to CHANGE them so that the come with MORE parts, and LESS specialty parts. Make the kids make the big flat vertical wings out of a big octagonal peice with some smaller octagonal peices stuck on it. But leave the bumps. Don't make one solid wing.
And get rid of that stupid ass Bionicle.
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.
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