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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!
Warhammer forums
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
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
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.
Regards,
The Amazing Sarcasmo
A goal is a dream with a deadline
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.
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.
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
Dude!
I wanna be a kid again!
Well, I for one bow down to our new Lego robot overlords...
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!
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...
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