Those last two links may give you a tiny peek into the world of Lego geekery on the internet. Just like everything else, it has been taken too far in some places. Lugnet and Peeron are just two of the many of sites dedicated to documenting Lego kit contents. Mindstorms also has its own dedicated following, with blogs, project sites, and even the official Lego Mindstorms Community site.
Alpha Rex: the humanoid bot that can walk, dance, open and close his hands, and detect colour.
Shooterbot: a tracked robot with a good grunty ball shooter.
Robogator: a alligator-esque bot that will lunge at you and snap viciously.
Color sorter: a mechanism that will sort coloured balls into different locations.
There is a good run-through of these kit bots over at TheNXTStep blog. When you consider that any one of these bots would itself be a fairly expensive technics set, the cost of the overall set starts to make a bit more sense. And once you’ve exhausted the opportunities from the kit bots, there are plenty of parts to build some fairly zany creations. The Mindstorms Community have regular challenges to stretch your imagination, and there is even a worldwide competitive robot league for kids aged 9-14.
Of course there’s nothing stopping you digging out additional technics sets and components and really going to town with your own creations. And then, if you get bored by that, there are companies dedicated to producing all sorts of third-party sensors for the NXT platform. Fancy measuring dissolved oxygen? How about exact digital compass heading?
Additionally, if you find that the Mindstorms programming interface is not keeping up with your expectations or abilities, you’re almost guaranteed to find a language you like. In fact, the Mindstorms NXT kit is a nice way to educate kids (and adults) in basic programming concepts. If they want to take it further, then one of those third-party language extensions is the next step. If you fancy yourself a real hacker, Lego embrace the modding community through an open source program.
Once you see just how far you can go with Mindstorms NXT, you start to understand that this is not your regular Lego set. A bit like a more refined Arduino, this is a platform for building electronic interactive objects. It just happens to be wrapped in Lego compatible connections and Lego branding.
And the hardware platform is open for all, which is a brilliant move by Lego imho as it fostered the large community of third party programming languages and hardware extensions. I can’t see a company like Mattel doing something similar.
Yep I linked to that in the post. They have documentation and downloads for Hardware, Software and Bluetooth development kits: http://mindstorms.lego.com/Overview/NXTreme.aspx.
Has the memory of the NXT Brick been expanded? At $279.99, we as retailers are going to have our work cut out for us explaining why this wasn’t released as a less expensive supplement (or series of supplements) for the original NXT. The sensors look the same as the NXT.
Hi Eric. Yes the new NXT Brick has more memory. 1MB now I think. The colour sensor also adds a whole new dimension to the types of robots you can build.
If you own a NXT, then NXT 2.0 is probably a difficult choice. You might be better off buying a colour sensor separately. As someone that doesn’t own a NXT, the 2.0 is a lot more tempting than the original kit.
I do not believe the brick has more memory, every other source seems to indicate that besides firmware the brick is the same.
i already own the original model and it is fantastic! i could even mount it my digital camera to take pictures all over the place, i better look for the 2.0, 2 intelligent bricks mean 6 servomotors!, im just wondering if i can link the 2 intelligent bricks to work as only one unit?.
The bricks can communicate with each other over Bluetooth. That would be the way to do it.
i own the origianal nxt and it is alaways running out of memory and i think they should create another with more memory than the 2.0 so it could record information from camera or the microphone.