Mindstorms a few years back; it didn’t immediately pique my interest. That all distorted when I heard how Lego had really embraced the community that had formed around the first few iterations.

After reading about that, I right away went and searched out come again? these guys had done, and frankly I was very frightened. Multitudes of robotic creations had been brought to life by these fans and many had even gone so far as to mod the components so that they could do even more than originally thought possible.

What Lego did next was impressive. They went and got together some of the top people in the Mindstorms communities, and brought them in to help design the next iteration, NXT. Let’s just say that if it weren’t for these guys. Which Lego is calling their MDP, Mind storms Developer Program, Mind storms wouldn’t be anywhere as advanced this time around as it could have been.

When all was said and done, NXT was light-years ahead of the previous versions. Included in the kit you can pick up for $249.99 ($349.99 CAD) are 3 servos (motors), almost 600 pieces, and an range of sensors that react to light, sound, touch, and even one for measuring your presence via a pair of ultra-sonic eyes’.

Advantages:

(1).Multitude of sensors available

(2).Bluetooth support

(3).Very extensible programming options

(4). High quality of construction

Disadvantages:

(1).Only 256 KB of user addressable memory

(2).Bluetooth very fastidious to get working

(3). $249.99 ($349.99 CAD)? That’s expensive!

(4).Masters and/or PhD in robotics and software engineering an asset

The models bring together quite easily, and the instructions for the examples are very easy to follow, but the difficulty of the models themselves left me feeling sheepishly under-skilled to go and create my own once I had tired all the options. Clearly I was a little over my head, but that doesn’t mean you will be. But, there are some places that I ran into problems, and I don’t think they were due to my own lack of imagination, good reason or completion. For one, the NXT unit, while being tremendously advanced, only has the ability for 256 KB of user storage memory. More than once I received “out of memory” errors while uploading my absurdly bland programs. I had to resort to ripping out all the jazzy sound effects I had put into them so that they would work.

Next, one of the innovations that NXT has over the unique is the use of either USB or Bluetooth to communicate back to the PC. The USB worked perfectly, but, although the process for pairing Bluetooth devices is more often than not quite a trivial and painless one in most other cases, to get the NXT and my PC up and running took a little wheedle, and maybe just a smattering of encouraging words. In the end I did get it to work, but it seems unnecessarily complex.

So, did those robo-fan-boys do Lego a favour in helping them design the NXT? Undoubtedly. But, if you’re not highly inclined to tinker and work out problems and designs for hours on end, you may feel left a little high and dry as I was once you run out of demo models to build and program. Also, you might have a hard time passing this off to a 10 year old, as Lego indicates that Mindstorms is for those aged 10+.

Lego Mindstorms NXT is absolutely quite an attractive and thought inspiring toy if it can even be called that. And to top it off, there are more than a few additions to this base set coming down the pipe in the next few months that’ll surely add to the difficulty that can be derived from it. So overall, if you’re a fan of the previous sets, and/or a robotics nut, then this system will definitely keep you busy just don’t go in hoping you’re going to program your Alpha Rex to go fetch you a beer a few hours after you open the package. I made that error. I’m still dehydrated.