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Lego Mindstorms NXT Robotics Announced
Denver_80203 writes "Just when you thought Lego Mindstorms was grinding its last gear, comes the announcement of Lego Mindstorms NXT Robotics Toolset, with sleek servo motors, an ultrasonic sensor which allows robots to 'see' by responding to movement, a sound sensor which enables robots to react to sound commands (including sound pattern and tone recognition) improved touch and light sensors, and a and a programmable brick with at least 7 or 8 RJ11 type jacks. Robot fun! Out in August 2006, and in true Lego style will cost $249." Wired has a preview of the cover story about the new kit on their site.
If you look at the high-resolution image, you can see that it has 7 RJ11 jacks and one USB port (top right corner).
The top three RJ11 ports look like servo outputs, the bottom four look like sensor inputs (though the fourth port is unnumbered; wonder why).
Nice, but most people here love RCX because we grew up with legos. RCX lets you get into the game without some crazy robotics boards / motors / computing stuff. Middle school kids can handle it.
BTW, for everyone with small kids, Lego now has super big quatro legos, double the size of duplo legos which are double normal size. Quatro runs from 1-3, duplo usually starts at age 2+...
I know slashdot ran a story on what went wrong, but they are far from dead. There is the FIRST Lego Racing League, which is a robotics compeition for grade school kids across the country. (Which then evolves into higher level products as they advance into high school). Heck I know several kids whose got RIS2.0 sets for Christmas. The parents are tired of their kids only seeing computers as video game machines - these kits are an excellent segway between fun and programming. There are plenty of high school and college kids, even adults doing stuff with them too... for example Jin Sato there is an available C compiler, even a Real Time OS!
-everphilski-
Try Ebay- I picked up 40 or so lbs of unsorted pieces for a good price. Guy even had some cheap lego webcamera thrown in.
"Mr. President, we cannot allow a mineshaft gap!"
I really really hope they provide som sort of API to control it using other languages.
I want to be able to write a program in maybe C#, Java, C++ compile it, translate it and then send it to the control unit.
The old mindstorms biggest annoyance was the stupid interface, okay labview is a lot better but still not the same.
Bluetooth support is awesome. One of the things I did not like about the original was the IR transmitter.
It's got Bluetooth, and they say it will be controllable from a host machine, be it a computer, a PDA, or a mobile phone. What more could you ask for?
But almost http://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nqc
It has Mac support this time out.
t orms.com
http://mindstorms.lego.com/?domainredir=www.minds
Fans of SNOT (Studs Not On Top) Lego design will love this kit, because there aren't any studs. It looks like everything's designed to hook together with Technic axles and connectors, and no "basic brick" connectivity.
When I was a FIRST Lego League coach, the designs often embedded motors, sensors, even the RCX as part of the structure. The latter was usually a bad, bad, idea, since you'd have to disassemble major parts of your bot to replace batteries, and during a competition, you'd replace batteries every other run.
I welcome the sensor-laden motors, bluetooth, ultrasonic 'vision'... but I wonder if they've beefed up the programming any. Lack of backward compatibility is a surprise -- I've got a number of old sensors and motors.
Design for Use, not Construction!
from the article:
There were plenty of strategic blunders behind the dismal results: a misguided foray into making PC software games, expensive licensing arrangements (chiefly with Disney), and designs that puzzled rather than entertained. "We had started to make fire trucks that look like spaceships, building systems that no customer could truly appreciate," says Mads Nipper, a Lego senior vice president. "We had to clean that up."
awesome!
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
From the very Lego page itself:
"The heart of the new system is the NXT brick, an autonomous 32-bit LEGO microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC, or for the first time in the retail offering, a Mac."
Herve S.
RTFA. Mindstorms 2.0 was the best-selling Lego kit of all time at $200.
// This is not a sig.
If you squint at the enlarged version of the left hand pic from the wired article, you'll get a rather pleasant surprise: it is going to be Mac compatible!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
There are actually many ways to program the original Mindstorms RCX. Although initially the only language was the one it came with, it was soon hacked. Languages were developed that took advantage of the default firmware (NQC), but many more were created that completely replaced the existing firmware. You could cross-compile C for it, and there was also a tiny Java VM that ran on it. Neither of these offloaded stuff to the PC.
It is high-grade, precision engineeered plastic. The LEGO robotics sets are made from lots of pieces of various shapes, not just one shape replicated thousands of times. Compare up against some of the LEGO knock-offs that are much cheaper. They hold together when you're building a static building, but if you try to build something that moves, they fall to pieces. You need plastic that fits *exactly* so that gears don't grind against each other and torque doesn't tear the robot apart. Personally, I'm impressed with the price -- it's asking a lot to get this kind of resource down to the point where kids can ever get ahold of it.
if you check the website (http://mindstorms.lego.com/) it claims mac & pc support
Logic brings Victory
Not really, though. The outputs are really just on or off, but if you toggle them fast enough you can emulate a whole range of output voltages. Which, incidentally, is what the horribly limited system the RCX ships with does, though so slowly that the motors make wicked grinding noises (well, at least mine do) if you run them at anything less than full speed.
IHMO (less humble now, perhaps, after a glass or two), the processor in the RCX isn't all that limited. Sure, you only have 16-bit registers and 32 kB, but it runs at a higher frequency than the 68k in my Amiga 500. Which makes me wonder whether I should spend the weekend playing with LEGO or playing old computer games...
This signature is not in the public domain.
Casing is a major problem for people that don't have access to the equipment required for PVC modelling.
How about access to a supermarket? Get a Rubbermaid or Tupperware sandwich container and some standoffs and you're off to the races with a fairly slick case for under $5 ($10-$15 for the Tupperware, but Tupperware has a stronger edge to the bowl part, which can be worth the extra cost).
If you're worried about the "ghetto" look, cut properly sized round holes and use rubber grommets or small metal bulkhead connectors to clean up the edges. If you do a decent job locating the holes, it will look very nice, and with the removeable top, it's quite functional too!
One of the skills I find most useful in amateur robotics is the ability to repurpose everyday items. When I go into Home Depot, I'll start playing with something on just about any aisle and my fiance will ask me, "What kind of a robot part are you going to make from that?" The worst aisles by far are in plumbing. Worst as in hardest for me to get through without stopping multiple times.
Regards,
Ross
I designed the compiler for the Mindstorms NXT (not counting the parser), so your statement strikes me as odd... because the entire compiler was written in LabVIEW itself. Given that the Mindstorms NXT is a product, that would make it a production programming language, would it not? The compiler does significant dataflow analysis, constant propagation, dead code elimination, register allocation, and identifies opportunities for parallelism, just for starters.
c id=14402793
:)
Regarding your other point - I find that most people are much more comfortable with visual concepts and cues than they are with words, excepting those who are CLI gurus. True, LabVIEW's collection of palettes and tools has been confusing, even for adults - this is why they've redesigned the palette system in LabVIEW 8.0; but they *completely* redesigned the entire concept of palettes for Mindstorms NXT. When you start seeing demos of the software you'll quite simply be blown away.
See my other post here as well for more info about the product:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173049&
Note, I left NI shortly after I completed the majority of my work on this project, so I feel I can (and should!) defend our hard work without fear of reprisals from management
-Robert Morton
I'm by no means the expert on some of your questions, but I'll try to help you out as best as I can.
:)
There is not currently a text format for LabVIEW programs, but your concern about version control has existed in the professional LabVIEW users community for quite some time. The core LabVIEW product has an excellent graphical Diff tool and integrates with standard source code control providers such as Perforce for version control. I don't recall seeing this in Robolab, but I could be mistaken (I was never a power user). I am also not certain how the software for Mindstorms NXT will handle this, though I imagine that it will be more of a concern in an academic package if one is released separately.
The Robolab compiler was quite clever, and was essentially built right into the blocks that kids drop in Robolab. When you "run" a program in Robolab, the blocks execute and save state information into global variables, in addition to emitting low-level bytecodes as they go along. When the end of the program has finished "running", all of the code and state that was collected is packaged together and downloaded to the brick. The downside to this single-pass approach was that no analysis could be done on the program for optimizations or even transformations like register allocations. Basically the kids had to be their own register allocators, choosing from colored "containers" to keep track of different variables.
The Mindstorms NXT compiler is a more traditional multi-pass, optimizing compiler. No containers are required, and instead the variables are inferred from the wires that carry data between two blocks. Unlike Robolab, where parallelism was explicitly managed with task splits and joins, all of the parallelism in Mindstorms NXT is inferred from the inherent parallelism that exists in a dataflow program. I'm not sure how much more detail I should delve into, so I'll leave things at that for now
-Robert