Slashdot Mirror
Fan-Designed Mindstorms Release Next Tuesday
EaglesNest writes "The Washington Post has a story describing Lego's new Mindstorms. Two years ago, Lego formed their own 'star chamber' to decide what the next iteration of Mindstorms would look like. Eventually reaching 14 people, the Mindstorm users panel had a huge impact on what will be released commercially next week." From the article: "One member was even able to pressure the company into building a part that makes its debut in the new Mindstorms set -- a rare event at Lego, which treats every individual piece with reverence. The new part is a connector that allows two long pieces to be joined at a 90-degree angle. The resulting toy has much more up-to-date technology than the original set, including a USB 2.0 port for fast downloads and Bluetooth for wireless connections. With the right parts and programming, a Mindstorms robot can dance in response to sounds or follow the beam of a flashlight."
I just have to say that a company that isn't afraid of letting thier consumers in on the R&D of a new prodect is really amazing, even if it is just a select few. I used the original mindstorms kit to build a robot in first year engineering, and from what I saw it was a really interesting kit. We ran linux on our computers so we used the LegOS using some NQC stuff. If Lego will open source their code from the get go then people like me, who preffer to code in C (or something close to it) than with Lego's crazy graphical method, will greatly appreciate it! I can see the new kit to be a big hit on budding roboticists who don't want to spend thousands on building a simple 'battlebot' style robot (here I mean building a car style bot, nothing fancy) only to not be able to re-use all the parts on another bot.
Har?
but I cant help but think LEGO's biggest problem was when they went away from generic build kits to licensed sets with highly proprietary (i.e. unusable for much else) pieces.
;)
They pretty much had to.
If the set has no unique pieces a kid with 10 other sets has no real need to buy it.
My kids are playing with thousands of pieces from my childhood. If lego was selling the same generic kits, I'd be hard pressed justifying buying them any new sets. The star war lego sets, for example, allowed us to build better tie fighters and x-wings than we'd been able to build out of classic space and blacktron...
Part of what made LEGO's cool in my day was that you could create just about anything you could think up.
You can still do that...or perhaps you never could.
Making a decent castle out of classic space lego was almost impossible, and making an x-wing out of the classic yellow castle was an exercise in futility. But with a good mix of lego from a variety of new sets, and you have as much freedom as you ever did. More freedom in some cases... I'd have killed for the ball joints that are common now.
Todays sets appear to be more of a model kit than a creative toy
Individually that's probably true. But lego still lets you go anywhere once you've got a few sets from different 'genres'.
I've had the set for a while now. I signed up for their Developer Program, but wasn't picked, however they were nice and gave everyone who wasn't chosen the chance to order it a month early. So I was able to play with it and build my robot. The only bad thing is that it's been sitting here next to my linux box while I wait for LEGO to release their SDKs for the bluetooth interface, which is supposed to be in August.
I must note: the bluetooth connectivity to the LEGO NXT is much easier to establish with a Linux box using BlueZ, than it is with a Windows box running MCE2005/SP2 or even Vista. It's just hit or miss with the Windows stuff, depending on whether the driver likes you, the temperature, the time of day, what color shirt you're wearing -- but one rfcomm line and pin confirmation in Linux and it's done.
That is, after all, how I'm going to let you darn slashdotters control it over the 'net, video included, when I finish programming the new protocol into my robot server.
One major suggestion was completely ignored: To increase the number of output ports. As it stands, the previous version had 3 outputs... and will now continue to.
Big mistake.
Word on the street suggests that additional multiplexers will be made available... elsewhere.
Interesting.