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.
Also, a ringer is the device that lets you know that somebody is calling on the telephone. It's a wringer that squeezes the water out of laundry, and it is a proverbial wringer through which Ars Technica has put Mindstorms.
I'm not a grammar nazi, but I play one on the internet.
Actually, isn't Lego a collective noun, like "play with the Lego" and "play with the sheep"? I personally prefer the term "Lego pieces" for more than one of the individual plastic components.
Like the noun fish. The plural of fish is fish. Yet there are many kinds of fishes.
If little Timmy took all the fish out of the tank and had them flopping around on the floor, you could exclaim, "put the fish back into the tank!" If it was a community tank that was disturbed, you could also calmly order Timmy to "put those fishes back into the tank."
No fish were imaginarily harmed when writing this.
and yet it is commonly acceptable by those who did and do play with Legos to refer to them in the plural.
Nobody asked a friend "wanna play with my Lego brand building blocks?"
Parents stepping on pieces in their livingrooms often scream "Pick up these damn legos!!!" or just "OW!!!!! Steven Thomas Jackson GET DOWN HERE NOW!!!!"
Looks like quite the kit. the 9 year old here was just talking about wanting to build a robot. Hmmm...
The confession prompts others--infrared communication on the units was sketchy, and it was difficult for advanced builders to incorporate enough motors and sensors to craft something sophisticated. Something adult[1]. Something that could, in short[2], get chicks[3] (not Steve's words).
[1] I think I saw one of these robots on a.de website once...
[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.
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.
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?
yep - and from the lego site, it looks like the new mindstorm uses technics also - so it seems that the parts for the new sets ought to work with the old mindstorm -- at least for the purely mechanical stuff, if not the rest.
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.
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 [legoeducation.com].
This looks like a promising one: Educational Resource Set [legoeducation.com]. 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 [lego.com] to the Technic Beam [lego.com].
http://bricklink.com/ [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.
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.
And your problem is...? It sounds like you're saying buying a whole lot of Lego is a bad thing.
Trust me, all of my old Lego works quite nicely with my NXT sets. For that matter, all of the Lego that I've bought after buying my NXT sets works quite nicely with my NXT sets.
I was also looking for Mindstorms NXT parts and found this site: LegoEducation.com [legoeducation.com]. It has an expansion kit [legoeducation.com] as well as individual motors and sensors.
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 [brickbash.nl], and this Flickr set [flickr.com] (not mine).
Ebay or bricklink should do the trick. 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.
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.
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!)
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.
Mindstorms has a C compiler, a RTOS, and even a.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 p
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 [schaab.com]
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...
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".
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.
These should be quite doable. The NXT brain has nice full-featured Bluetooth [lego.com]. 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.
There is a guy at Microsoft in the Windows Mobile group who has interfaced his bluetooth enabled camera phone to the NXT brick. He has instructions for replicating his bot at wimobot.com [wimobot.com].
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/ [www-p-net.org]
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!
by Anonymous Coward
on Thursday August 31 2006, @01:48PM (#16017854)
Check out this guy's lego robot, controllable in your browser.
http://turbogfx.homelinux.org/legocam/ [homelinux.org]
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 th
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 tri
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 dais
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. [sourceforge.net]
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.
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:)// hdw
The plural of Lego is Lego (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
If little Timmy took all the fish out of the tank and had them flopping around on the floor, you could exclaim, "put the fish back into the tank!" If it was a community tank that was disturbed, you could also calmly order Timmy to "put those fishes back into the tank."
No fish were imaginarily harmed when writing this.
Re:The plural of Lego is Lego (Score:4, Funny)
Two fish were in a tank. One asks the other "do you know how to drive this thing?"
Parent
Thanks for clearing that up for us... (Score:3, Funny)
The Amazing Sarcasmo
Re:The plural of Lego is Lego (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Nobody asked a friend "wanna play with my Lego brand building blocks?"
Parents stepping on pieces in their livingrooms often scream "Pick up these damn legos!!!" or just "OW!!!!! Steven Thomas Jackson GET DOWN HERE NOW!!!!"
Looks like quite the kit. the 9 year old here was just talking about wanting to build a robot. Hmmm...
hunter warrior (Score:5, Funny)
No death ray available (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
MS and Lego (Score:5, Informative)
Ahh, the real reason to build robots... (Score:3, Funny)
[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.
Right (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm curious what else is in the box.... (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Re:I'm curious what else is in the box.... (Score:5, Insightful)
What are you talking about? They're right here. [lego.com]
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://shop.lego.com/leaf.asp?cn=47&d=11&t=5 [lego.com]
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.
Re:I'm curious what else is in the box.... (Score:5, Informative)
This looks like a promising one: Educational Resource Set [legoeducation.com]. 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 [lego.com] to the Technic Beam [lego.com].
Regards,
Ross
Parent
BrickLink for spare parts!:I'm curious what els... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
And your problem is...? It sounds like you're saying buying a whole lot of Lego is a bad thing.
Trust me, all of my old Lego works quite nicely with my NXT sets. For that matter, all of the Lego that I've bought after buying my NXT sets works quite nicely with my NXT sets.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I hope this helps,
Hunter
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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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.
Oblig Stargate reference (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No thanks, Vex is more fun. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No thanks, Vex is more fun. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:No thanks, Vex is more fun. (Score:4, Informative)
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!)
Parent
Mindstorms does that (Score:3, Informative)
Mindstorms has a C compiler, a RTOS, and even a
Lego NXT review (Score:4, Informative)
"The Ugly" (Score:5, Funny)
Robot! Make me breakfast. (Score:2)
h263 video embedded in a browser? (Score:2)
What about cube/mesh/tree topologies? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:What about cube/mesh/tree topologies? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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/ [www-p-net.org]
Ao the hardware is there, and the firmware is upg
Yay! (Score:2, Troll)
I bow to my intellectually superior lego overlords!
Lego Robot (Score:5, Interesting)
Labview alternative? (Score:2)
Why bother calling it a toy? (Score:2)
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 tri
I'm disappointed (Score:2)
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 dais
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You should have been using this. [sourceforge.net]
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: (Score:3, Informative)
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
I think I speak for us all when I say... (Score:3, Interesting)
I wanna be a kid again!
Well, I for one bow down to our new Lego robot overlords...