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New Lego Mindstorms Dissected

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the go-my-robotic-army-destroy dept.

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.

6 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. MS and Lego by CaymanIslandCarpedie · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  2. Lego NXT review by CottonThePirate · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  3. Re:I'm curious what else is in the box.... by rossifer · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.
    What you want are lego dacta (educational) sets. Look for Pitsco Lego Dacta.

    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.

    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.
    The standards are the same, but the primary building element has changed. From the Technic Brick to the Technic Beam.

    Regards,
    Ross
  4. BrickLink for spare parts!:I'm curious what els... by hmbcarol · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:No thanks, Vex is more fun. by Lumpy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.
  6. Re:What about cube/mesh/tree topologies? by kherr · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.