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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
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
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
Lego online store sells different Technic piece-kits ranging from $6 to $13:
http://shop.lego.com/leaf.asp?cn=47&d=11&t=5
They have a gear kit with 39 gear pieces for $13... axle kit, connector kit, beam kit, wheel and axle kits, and a $30 motor kit.
The new Mindstorms NXT also sells the NXT brick and the sensors and motors seperately, although if you bought all the sensors and motors separately, it would be $25 more than the NXT kit itself and wouldn't include any of the beams/connectors.
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This looks like a promising one: Educational Resource Set. It's described as complementary to the new Mindstorms Education set (derived from the NXT kit) and is only $59. Looks like lots of structure, gearing, and wheels for a decent price.
Currently out of stock. Probably worth back-ordering, however.
The standards are the same, but the primary building element has changed. From the Technic Brick to the Technic Beam.
Regards,
Ross
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.
That is cool as wellas wierd, but I have wifi connectivity through mine as well as being able to extend it farther. The lego sensors are not really easy to hack to interface to a real computer interface without heavily modifying them to the point that they look nasty when used normally. I know I have that kit.
I end up using the more extendable VEX simply because it's far easier to attach a SBC to it than lego. I also can fabricate specalized parts in 30 minutes after a trip to home depot, something that is darn hard under the lego system.
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.
plus you will never ever get lego's processor to connect to a wifi connection and send back video. (Hacked pair of optical mice makes awesom machine vision BTW!)
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
>Each brick can communicate with three others?
It's Bluetooth. It should be able to communicate with up to 7 others in a piconet or many more using a network layer, unless Lego have put artificial contraints on the product.
Evil people are out to get you.
I was also looking for Mindstorms NXT parts and found this site: LegoEducation.com. It has an expansion kit as well as individual motors and sensors.
I hope this helps,
Hunter
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
Unlike the original Mindstorms being dominated by bricks and plates, Mindstorms NXT is really a Technics set with all kinds of liftarms, axles and connectors. It's much more like building robots than putting bricks together. See this photo of what's in the box, and this Flickr set (not mine).
Also, for teachers, I believe there's several educational (read: bulk) technic sets for schools. I believe the educational program was called Dacta.
Point is, a quick ebay search for "lego technic" or "lego ####" (model number of technic set) can produce massive quantites of bricks for a practically nothing. I've also had good luck with bricklink stores in the past, but that's more for if you need one special piece.
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These should be quite doable. The NXT brain has nice full-featured Bluetooth. I have no problem connecting via Bluetooth on my PowerBook (no Bluetooth with Intel Macs until the universal binary is released). I was amazed that it paired with my Samsung T509 with absolutely no effort. Now I just need some software on my phone to control the robot. Or collect data.
The flexibility and robustness of the Bluetooth communications seems present, it's just a matter of writing software to send data through the mesh. I'm not sure if the default programming tool has the flexibility (yet) for this kind of logic, but the control of the sensors and motors is very detailed.
1) Still? You weren't actually programming the old bricks with that awful language that lego gave you, were you?
You should have been using this.
I'm sure that there'll be something else like it for the new ones. The old ones were based on the well known ATMEL chips, IIRC, and were therefore easy to write a specialized compiler for. I expect much of the same here.
2) I refer you back to #1. Write your own communication protocol and use a serial line. You can.
Of course, the real question here is why you're bothering with legos at all.
Buy a solderless breadboard, your own ATMEL programmer and a chip or five and use 'em directly. You're a short hop away if you're already doing programming in a real language and expanding your communication mechanisms. It's not like you can't use legos for your housing even when you're not using bricks for all the motorized parts.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
As the owner of the robot you link to... I'd like to get your contact information so I can bill you for a new DSL modem when this one explodes. Maybe a new router also.
Yes, I am actually the owner... and yes, my modem isn't liking this very much x_x
Check the NXT HDK, page 8.
:) // hdw
Port 4 can also function as a bi-directional multidrop RS485 high speed link (well 921.6 Kbit/s at least).
So expanders and multiplexers like the ones we've seen for the RCX is included in their plans. If noone else start to build and sell them first
Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering