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New Lego Mindstorms Dissected
Turismo writes "The new Mindstorms NXT robotics kit from Lego is put through the ringer by the guys at Ars Technica, and they like what they find. From the article: 'the NXT brick can communicate with three other Bluetooth devices at any one time. This means that if you had four Mindstorms kits, you could create a mega-robot with four brains, twelve motors, and sixteen sensors — all of it coordinated through Bluetooth. The setup also works with cell phone and PDA Bluetooth systems, meaning that you can use your phone as a remote control or an output device.'" Update: 08/31 18:54 GMT by Z : Fixed absent submittor.
Ok, that's out of the way. FP
time to build a lego bot that uses bluetooth to hunt down and destroy people's ringing cell phones. Yay technology!
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Besides it being MS here is a pretty awsome site for samples, references, and tools for playing with Lego MindStorm.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
[1] I think I saw one of these robots on a
[2] I think if you're trying to get shorts, you've got electrical design issues
[3] 'Get' or 'Make' chicks... best prom ever?
I'm only making these (inane) jokes because I lack the skills to make a really awesome robot of my own. Call it robot envy.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Seems to me that with the use of bluetooth the stage is set for setting up multiple NXTs like a distributed computer. They hinted to the possibility in the article, but I imagine that this could be a wonderful way to teach distributed programming to computer science students or high schoolers because they can see how the different components are interacting in a much more simple environment.
Or, we can build the next super computer out of NXTs for the hell of it...
Obviously this is much better than mindstorm. If you have a mindstorm kit, it is officially and woefully inadequate. What I recommend you do, for your own good, is to go out and buy this new kit. Then mail all your old mindstorm stuff to me.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I enjoy working with my Mindstorms set, but I've run into a serious limitation. The parts that come with the Mindstorms kit just aren't sufficient for building anything cool. The Technic sets are long gone. The best I could figure is that I'd have to buy a whole lot of Mindstorms to get enough gears, shafts, and standard bricks to build anything really nifty. Obviously cost prohibitive, but at least I'd have a lot of RCX bricks.
Not knowing how acurate the photo is in the article, it appears that they may have started moving even the Mindstorms from the standards of the Technics sets.
Anyone know of a way to get my hands on standard Technic parts or am I SOL?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Looks like the Replicators are finally here. Heh, I wonder if it would be possible to build something that looks like a Replicator from these...it would be fun to set it loose at work and let it meander through the various cubicles.
I tried the lego route and moved on to the VEX platform. the VEX is easier to transition to real processing hardware as the sensors are really stinking easy to interface to, all metal screw/nut construction allows you to build more permananent setups and prototypes.
I have a pc104 computer sitting on mine using a 386 and a hand rolled linux install... easier to do with a VEX setup than lego.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here is a brief review with video of my experience and a screen shot of the interface. Bottom line: Pretty cool, lots of time goes into making even a simple robot. Lego Mindstorms NXT review
FAQ
Wincopy
Nate Anderson is right to an extent: Building with Legos as a kid involved so much of my time that I did actually eat less (and lose sleep on occasion). But if I could use those legos to deliver dinner to my room, I wouldn't be missing too many meals anymore...
I'm waiting for the next release.
So you could detonate a explosive device remotley with your Mindstorm then? TSA Ban...
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A goal is a dream with a deadline
Like a telephone? Or a wringer, like on an old washing machine?
It was "put through the ringer"? I suppose that sounded a lot nicer than when they put it through the wringer.
Each brick can communicate with three others? Well, those three don't need to communicate with the same three, do they? You should be able to create a cube topology by forwarding messages to set up an 8-way system, or even set up a hexagonal mesh or a binary tree for an n-way topology. For example, you could have a forebrain-hindbrain "backbone" with two intelligent "limb" processors off each "brain"... or even build a version of Bob Forward's "Christmas Bush".
http://bricklink.com/ is sort of like ebay for LEGO. There are thousands of sellers around the world who buy Technic kits, break them down, then sell the parts. When you need exactly 5 of a particular gear it's a godsend. I built my Difference Engine using LEGO bought from various sellers there.
I for one, welcome our new Lego Robot Overlords...
Devil bunnies! I snort the nose! Lucifer! Banana! Banana!
I work with my university's RoboCuphttp://www.robocup.org/ team. We've been looking at Microsoft Robotics Studio http://msdn.microsoft.com/robotics/learn/default.a spx for doing a lot of our simulation (since it incorporates a plethora of features, and a great physics engine, and because Microsoft give us lots of *bling*).
The thing that struck me most while going over the studio was it's great tie-ins to real Lego robots, namely the old Mindstorms and the new NXT. It's pretty exciting and a great way for people to get into serious robotics without all the hassle of machining parts, soldering electronics, and programming firmware. Definitely a cool product.
This means that if you had four Mindstorms kits, you could create a mega-robot with four brains, twelve motors, and sixteen sensors -- all of it coordinated through Bluetooth
I bow to my intellectually superior lego overlords!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Check out this guy's lego robot, controllable in your browser. http://turbogfx.homelinux.org/legocam/ It's got a video feed and you can drive it all over his house.
My university holds a real time systems course that uses Mindstorms so that CS majors can build physical systems without needing to know things like welding and soildering and other machining things. But labview is a bit underpowered for us, when you want to talk about things like multithreaded applications undergoing realtime constraints. Traditionally we've used "Not Quite C", which is a c syntax with a few useful extensions and a library capable of manipulating some of the specific hardware devices on the lego command brick.
Not Quite C appears to have died out in 2005, is there anything in the works for this new stuff, or is it merely the same parts in different colors?
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IF you are interested in never going farther in robotics the Lego system is darn nice and easier to deal with, but if you want to program your Bot in C or C++ (or even ruby) under a real time OS you have to do some really ugly hacks.
.NET port. Not all that hard to work with, either (I know ... my little brother has one, and I've assisted in the FIRST robotics competitions) I'm not saying they don't have limitations - I prefer a MC68HC11 board myself - but prettymuch every dig you have about the Mindstorms kit is patently false.
Mindstorms has a C compiler, a RTOS, and even a
I played with the Mindstorms kits for a while in one of my EE courses. It was fun and fairly simple, but, as tends to be the case, cut out a lot of the low-level stuff that makes robotics and engineering so fun. I have been planning on picking up the BASIC stamp kit sometime, so that I can play with a bit more, have greater control, and probably spend more time debugging my projects. Mindstorms is great, NXT sounds pretty cool, but I will take my BASIC kit, I do believe.
sheesh, but then again, English with proper spelling is a foreign language for Americans I guess.
I don't want to sound like a party pooper, but is a $250 Lego set even superficially meant for children?
I'm not destitute, but I have a hard time justifying a $50 present for a child, much less a $250 one.
I'm NOT saying the system isn't worth it, and I'm NOT suggesting that LEGO lower the price for what seems like a really cool thing. (Then again, LEGO have never, ever been a 'reasonably priced toy' in any guise, so let's not kid ourselves that they couldn't price this at 40% off and probably double or triple the people that could afford one while still making a hefty $$.)
Maybe I just don't live in the same world as the rest of you? But seriously, how many 10-14 year olds are ever going to get this?
-Styopa
All the reviews I've seen are very positive, but none of the features I want seem to be in the new kit.
1) Still can't program in a real language: I want to make a double-dimensioned array so I can map out an NxN grid for a game. It doesn't look like I can do that in this set. When I was 10 years old, I was using BASIC to code, and it had this ability.
2) I want a growable set of inputs and outputs. If I want a 4th motor, their solution is to buy another brain. Instead, I should be able to plug-in a daisy-chain connector and assign one as motor 0 and the other as motor 1. The mod community made something like this for the old Mindstorms. Without that, this is just as limited as the old set. You can't make anythin significant without more motors and sensors. They don't all need to be running at once.
I still have hopes that a more detailed review will reveal that these things are actually possible.
I mean what happens when some kid builds a super evil genuis type robotic menace and goes on a killing rampage. The worst that could happen with the lincoln logs was maybe a bad splinter. That said I WANT to build that super evil genuis robot, but only use it's powers for the good of mankind (yeah right).
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yes but does it run Linux?
The Discovery Channel online store has a coupon for 15% off today only and it works for the Mindstorms NXT. Enter TOYDAY in the coupon box at checkout. They charge tax and ~$20 for shipping though, but for me it came out to about $244.
Price has nothing to do whether or not something is a toy.
Legos are pretty cheap. witht hee xception of the big Kits.
an industries 10-14 year olf could make 250 bucks pretty quick. a couple of weeks of mowing lawns ought to do it.
If you had a child who was into robots, this is an excellent step for them to make, and the laungage is pretty good. So for some people it will be more of an investment towrds there children that is worth the price tag.
Based on Lego sales and quality, I would say the Lego could not mark the goods down 40%.
Don't confuse the retail price with the wholesale price.
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Dude!
I wanna be a kid again!
Well, I for one bow down to our new Lego robot overlords...
Please submit a link to a coral-cached picture of your difference engine :)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
It was on Slashdot many moons ago. It's at http://acarol.woz.org/. I'm VERY close to having a significantly improved design posted. Enjoy...
If each NXT can communicate with 4 other, it could communicate with an infinite number of other NXTs.
Example: You have 10 NXTs in a room, all set up and running. Each NXT has 4 connections. NXT1 connects to NXT2, 3, 4, 5. NXT5 is already connected to NXT1, and connects to NXT6, 7, 8. NXT8 is already connected to NXT5, and connects to NXT9, 10.
If NXT10 wants to communicate with NXT3, for example, it would have to use NXT8 as a relay to NXT5, as a relay to NXT3.
It's not as fast or efficient as connecting directly, but it uses a 'network' of connections. That is, of course, assuming that it can bridge connections or relay messages.
Think of the children? Hell no! This is for ME! :D
In my university days, I've worked on a Multi Agent Robotic System (MARS) in which simple robots calculate their position using odometry and mark where they collided with obstacles, thus allowing for mapping of a given area. The interesting part was allowing the individual agents to communicate when they come close to each other and average their predicted positions and headings to compensate for the error in the odometry calculation. :)
In simulation it worked great (using netlogo), but in real life tests, using Lego Mindstorms, it failed miserably. Partly because the agents could only communicate when their InfraRed sensors were aligned. This required that the bots align themselves to face each other every time a collision was detected, seriously slowing down the operation and opening much more room for error. And also the the code is horrible
If we had these bluetooth enabled cores, we could have let them communicate much more easily and constantly instead of waiting for both bots to align, much like the simulation.
Project page here.
^_^
They used a very similar type of system to this lego kit - dragging and dropping functional tasks onto a grid (move, sense, turn, fire etc), adjusting the variables of the function and building up a sort of flow-chart of action/reaction. Then you'd stick them in the arena and see how they fared...
At the time, I remember thinking: why can't someone build a real robot kit with this kind of control mechanism? This NXT interface is quite a lot more sophisticated than the game I played, but it's such an ingenious way of controlling a simple robot - and I feel absolutely certain that it's the perfect way to introduce kids to the high-level concepts of programming and robotics without their having to slog through years of groundwork first.
If I could think of any decent use for this kit in my life, I would buy one instantly. As it is, I'm seriously considering getting one anyway, just to revel in the powerful simplicity of such a wonderful idea.
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Port 4 doubles as a 921.6 Kbit/s RS485 link, multidrop, see http://www-p-net.org/
... yesno?
ITYM http://www.p-net.org/