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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.

4 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I'm curious what else is in the box.... by Moofie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "The Technic sets are long gone."

    What are you talking about? They're right here.

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    Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
  2. Re:Oblig Stargate reference by Mercano · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You'd need metal bricks (or at least lego tapshoes) to get that distinctive sound out of them, though. (Plus, of course, the servo noise.)

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  3. Re:The plural of Lego is Lego by SydShamino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Adjectives don't get plurals. The plural of LEGO brand building block is LEGO brand building blocks. ~

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    It doesn't hurt to be nice.
  4. Re:What about cube/mesh/tree topologies? by hdw · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well both USB and Bluetooth are designed to link gadgets to a central unit of some kind.
    It's never intented to be a networking solution.

    It is possible to expand the setup by switching roles (one uber brain gives commands to 3 others, these then switch to master and talks to 3 more each.
    But it would be a painful setup.

    However, the designers seems to have understood that issue too.
    Port 4 doubles as a 921.6 Kbit/s RS485 link, multidrop, see http://www-p-net.org/

    Ao the hardware is there, and the firmware is upgradeable (and replaceable) it's just up to what people want, and can code.

    But what bugs me is that this review, like many others, claim that the sound sensor can react to tunes and melodies.

    But all documentation states that it only measures sound pressure.
    So it can react to a loud sound, or series of them, like hand claps, but that's it.

    Makes you wonder why reviews claim functions not supported by the docs. // hdw

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    Executive Pope (small) Kallisti Engineering