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Robotics Education Toys

Lego Unveils New 'Robot Inventor' Mindstorms Kit (pcmag.com) 42

Posted by EditorDavid from the coming-for-Christmas dept.
After seven years, Lego has finally unveiled a new Mindstorms kit, reports PC Magazine -- the Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor, available this fall for $359: The Robot Inventor kit lets kids (or adults) build five different robot models out of 949 pieces, ranging from a four-legged walker to a bipedal wheeled robot that can give high-fives. All of these robots can be programmed to perform different tricks, like grabbing items, firing plastic projectiles, avoiding obstacles, and playing various sports with a ball.

The kit includes four low-profile, medium-angular motors; a color and light sensor; and a distance sensor, which work together with the Intelligent Hub block to power these robots and execute commands. Of course, like all Mindstorms kits, you can build your own robotic creations with the tools at hand, and add Lego Technic and System pieces for more complex projects.

The Intelligent Hub serves as the brain of Lego Mindstorms, and the block that houses the Mindstorms Robot Inventor Kit is the most advanced one yet. It features six input/output ports for sensors and motors, a six-axis gyro/accelerometer, a speaker, and a five-by-five LED matrix. The Intelligent Hub and all robots built with it can be controlled wirelessly over Bluetooth with the Lego Mindstorms Robot Inventor app for Android, iOS, Windows 10, and macOS. The app supports programming in both the tile-based Scratch language and in Python, for more complex projects that require the precision of written code.
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Lego Unveils New 'Robot Inventor' Mindstorms Kit More

Lego Unveils New 'Robot Inventor' Mindstorms Kit

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  • Meh (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Sunday June 14, 2020 @11:41AM (#60181870) Homepage

    When I was young Lego used to be a reasonably priced kit of parts - a plastic version of meccano really - you could build anything with. Now its a cynical overpriced cash cow with many special use pieces and figurines that cant really be used in anything other than the particular assembly they came in. We no longer buy it for our kid.

    • They realised that mistake years ago and greatly reduced the number of single purpose blocks in their kits. I’m not a huge fan of the franchise kits, but my nephews seem to like them. And there’s still Technic which has stayed more or less true to form. My one doubt about the modern Technic kits is that they go together a lot more cleverly. It’s impressive, but it might actually put off kids from trying their own builds.

      Back when I was young, about half the kids treated Lego as plastic

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Ormy ( 1430821 )
        When I was young the other kids just used to make houses and things with the lego people and roleplay with the characters. I was to introverted for that, I wanted to make machines. I watched my dad build a 3 speed gearbox out of technic lego but that was a bit beyond me at the time. K'nex gave me exactly what I wanted, I could build crude machines that worked and were less finicky/temperamental than those built from technic lego.

    • When I was young Lego used to be a reasonably priced kit of parts - a plastic version of meccano really - you could build anything with. Now its a cynical overpriced cash cow with many special use pieces and figurines that cant really be used in anything other than the particular assembly they came in. We no longer buy it for our kid.

      Lego still makes sets like that -- outside of the big licensed themes, they have things like the Creator 3-In-1 line that are heavier on generic bricks and come with official instructions for alternate builds. (They used to have some pictures of alternate builds in the back of the instructions, even in their licensed sets, but I guess Lucasfilm or Disney or whoever said 'not anymore' -- ironic, given that lots of Star Wars ships were originally made by kitbashing official model kits, but whatever.)

    • When I was young Lego used to be a reasonably priced kit of parts - a plastic version of meccano really - you could build anything with. Now its a cynical overpriced cash cow with many special use pieces and figurines that cant really be used in anything other than the particular assembly they came in. We no longer buy it for our kid.

      I actually feel like non-licensed LEGO sets are cheaper than ever, inflation adjusted. But this isn't a LEGO kit, it's a modular robotics kit.

    • Re:Meh (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Sunday June 14, 2020 @01:21PM (#60182110)

      When I was young Lego used to be a reasonably priced kit of parts - a plastic version of meccano really - you could build anything with. Now its a cynical overpriced cash cow

      What do you base this on? Let's look at this in detail shall we?

      1989 - 6285 Black Seas Barracuda - RRP $110 this thing was a beast it had 909 parts, many of which custom and could only be used on the Barracuda and works out to $0.121 per part or $0.2502 per part in inflation adjusted terms.
      2011 - 4184 The Black Pearl - RRP $99.99 with slightly less parts at only 804, many of which are custom. Overall this worked out to $0.1245 per part or $0.1490 in inflation adjusted terms.

      Ok say boats with custom parts haven't held up. Why not look at castles. 1984 - 6074 Black Falcon’s Fortress $35 RRP, $0.0805 per part and full of custom parts. Now I can't find a castle that cheap. Mind you I also can't find a castle with only 435 parts, but the 2012 9468 Vampyre Castle which has an RRP of $100 worked out to be $0.1054 per part. Not appreciably different and actually *much* cheaper when adjusted for inflation.

      Your problem is you don't know the value of money. You look at a sticker price alone. You ignore the average Lego set in the 80s ran at 150 pieces where as in 2020 it runs at 375. You probably think inflation is a foreign concept like everyone including those people who think that $1000 smartphones is something new as opposed to a standard inflation adjusted price of a smartphone from the 90s.

      You have a rose colored view of the past and ignore just how many custom blocks were in sets in the past. Sure you could buy just bricks and maybe you did. Personally my pride and joy was the 6958 Android Base. It was a monster and I think it was all custom blocks. There were only two possible things to build with it, but man it was awesome.

      But if you are the overly creative type, head over to www.lego.com, and just buy bricks. You can buy basically any kind of brick in any colour and any quantity. Best of all, thanks to inflation you'll find the price is less than half of what it used to be back in the 80s, because that's the reality. The only one here cynical seems to be you using some factually incorrect "cost" as a justification for not buying your kids toys. For shame.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by skam240 ( 789197 )

        Well you were completely spot on until you said "You probably think inflation is a foreign concept like everyone including those people who think that $1000 smartphones is something new as opposed to a standard inflation adjusted price of a smartphone from the 90s.". Maybe did you mean to type "cell phone"? Dumb cell phones were a rarity in the 90's and there were certainly no smart phones, the first iphone came out in 2007 and while there was some precursor stuff out there none of it dates back that far ht [ooma.com]

        • A Newton with a GSM data brick counted. Kinda.

        • Maybe did you mean to type "cell phone"?

          Well companies have been showing off smartphone devices since the mid 90s, but technically the first true Smartphone as far as I can tell was the one announced in 1999 and which I bought in early 2000. Ericsson R380, ran Symbian OS, had a web browser, PDA which tracked timezones, and while using the internet on it was about as fun as a trip to the dentist it was very much a smartphone and with it's eyewatering $700 RRP it broke the $1000 barrier inflation adjusted before Apple and Samsung made it cool.

          Dumb cell phones were a rarity in the 90's

          Not s

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by skam240 ( 789197 )

            Oh wow, your individual experience defined the 90's!

            I'm not going to be waste my time wit this nonsense. Show me the numbers for this mass acceptance of cell phones in the 90's and I'll show you the portal to Narnia.

        • May I introduce you to the Nokia Communicator range, first released in 1996 - it was most definitely a "smart phone" as we would define them now - and it wasn't even the first.

        • Um, there were smartphones in the 90s:

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]

          Only back then they were for business professionals, and did not have stupid apps for putting big creepy anime eyes and cat ears on your self portraits.

      • You really need to get out more. Plus the pricing and sets were different here in the UK.

        • You really need to get out more. Plus the pricing and sets were different here in the UK.

          Get out more? It's been raining all day. I have no desire to leave the apartment.

          And yes the pricing was different in the UK. But it was always difference and consistently different. For the best part of 30 years you've been paying the same 20% markup on Lego, so unless you moved from the US to the UK the above figures still hold very much true... at least up to 2016. When you guys shat the bed it's widely known that Lego was one of the companies that tacked on an additional 20% Brexit stupidity tax on your

      • I have more money than when I was a kid. That overrides the other concerns.

        As a kid: $99 (well UK pounds back then) : Not an option.
        As a principle engineer with 30 years industry experience: $399 : Well if I like it I could buy it.

        • Not sure why that's relevant. I don't think kids bought Lego. It's the parent's they they suck up to that open the wallet, regardless of whether they are engineers of principles or principal* engineers ;-).

          Maybe you're actually a principle engineer, but this just triggered me because my own HR department could spell my job title when I got the role of principal engineer. :-)

    • When did you grow up? I ask because when I was a kid in the 80's they were expensive then.

    • Well, they computers are getting too advanced in my view. The original mindstorms was a simple 8 bit processor, you could use the dummy graphical programming language or roll your own. Lots of fun I felt, as a programmer. The later ones had a camera and would send images to your PC to do the work of figuring stuff out, so more advanced but also dumbed down in a way and not autonomous.

    • "many special use pieces and figurines that cant really be used in anything other than the particular assembly they came in"

      It's a poor craftsman that blames his tools. Stop trying to pin your lack of creativity on others.

  • When their patent expired, I thought they were surely toast - incredibly over-priced Lego 'Lego Batman' (WTF??) and ridiculously over-priced (but nonetheless awesome) Saturn V sets notwithstanding - but what they pulled out of their asses with Mindstorm is literally next-fucking-level shit.

    Kudos to those glorious Danish bastards.

    • ridiculously over-priced (but nonetheless awesome) Saturn V

      Buying a Saturn V today might set you back a lot, since it's out of production, but its MSRP of $120 for 1,969 pieces was substantially lower than the typical 10c/part breakpoint (for their non-licensed sets, anyway...they charge more for the licensed sets because (a) license fees and (b) they know people will pay more for them).

      When their patent expired, I thought they were surely toast

      Star Wars and Bionicle saved them in 1999. Maybe that was in your Dark Age [thebrickblogger.com]?

    • Lego didn't need Mindstorm to survive. It was going to survive based on 3 major traits:
      1) Brand recognition, it's like Photoshop in that department. People will call Lego knock offs "Lego". That alone gives you incredible market power.
      2) Quality, people like calling Lego overpriced but they are made to incredible tolerances and last and incredible amount of time. There are many knockoffs on the market and you can instantly feel the difference when trying to assemble something. Check out the Youtube video of

      • NQC on the yellow compute brick was an excellent computing environment for kids to explore and learn stuff. Bare metal microcontroller + sensors + motor control + C like language.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mark-t ( 151149 )
          NQC was crap... not significantly better than the windows-only visual programming environment that came with the brick. If you wanted to anything really useful, you needed to replace the firmware with something else. LeJOS and pbForth were both pretty respectable in that department.

          • In what way is it crap?
            It's nothing like the windows only visual programming environment which really was crap.

            It's a small 8 bit micro, NQC was a reasonable compromise on the stack heavy nature of C that would gobble up all the ram before you started.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by edis ( 266347 )

      They did not pull Mindstorms out of there, it was fruit of long standing collaboration with MIT Media Lab.

      https://www.media.mit.edu/post... [mit.edu]

  • I have kids in just the right age range, my first thought was this will be perfect for them. For the price, I'd rather get them a Nintendo Switch, an Arduino kit, and maybe some Vex robotics kits.

    For a smal pile of lego and a few electronic parts $360 is insane.

    • I have kids in just the right age range, my first thought was this will be perfect for them. For the price, I'd rather get them a Nintendo Switch, an Arduino kit, and maybe some Vex robotics kits.

      Maybe the previous gen Mindstorms can be had used for a good price?

    • If you already had Lego stuff around, it might be a good investment. I have a lot of Technics that would be interesting in this context, like pneumatics. On the other hand, I'm sure there's people gutting and re-stuffing their RCXs with Arduino already. The Lego motors historically are pretty good, though. And it sounds like they have good language support. Maybe it's worth it to people without electronics experience to just buy it.

    • For a smal pile of lego and a few electronic parts $360 is insane.

      You missed something: Development platform. Depending on how old your kids are that Arduino Kit may very well catch dust very quickly. Mindstorm and the click together nature of Lego is orders of magnitude easier to get into than Arduino programming and Vex robotics.

    • I have a 13 year old son that's really into coding and robotics (though now he's teaching himself Python to make a video game). I've looked into the robotics options out there. The non-LEGO ones tend to fall into two categories:

      1) Inexpensive but limited. These either require proprietary coding languages or are limited to a version of Scratch. That's if they can be coded at all. (Some are glorified RC kits that can store and replay commands and are thus called "robotics kits.") They also tend not to be exte

  • Plastic for robots is just lame. No power, no rigidity, doesn't look like the Terminator ...

    Why the hell aren't they offering metal editions of all their parts. (I know regular bricks are gonna have to be a little different to work. But when did Lego sell them the last time anyway? ;)

  • Python, for more complex projects that require the precision of written code.

    Has anyone here ever encountered written code that was precise?

  • The PC Magazine link in the Slashdot post has few details, but there are some more informative reviews online, including this one by Brick Fanatics:

    https://www.brickfanatics.com/... [brickfanatics.com]
  • Can you make all five at the same time or do you have to take parts from other builds?

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