Anyone play with lego mindstorms?

[StageLeft]

www.mindstorms.com you can buy lego kits and build AI into it with programming code. My brother bought a kit last night...but he is asleep now - how much do these cost (I can't find it) and how easy is it to jump in with this? Are you limited significantly by what u can do? What programming languages will the lego CPU accept?

 

[oLLie]

Where's that link to the guy who had the blueprints for a USP and MP5 made out of Lego blocks?

Bump for Lego!
(I guess I'm interested in this mindstorms thing as well)
How old is your brother?

 

[Special K]

I don't know what the default way to program these things is, but I used a language that some guy wrote called Not-Quite-C, which is basically C with the extra features of the robot built in (turn on motors, etc.), and some other features removed because the cpu doesnt support them. For example, you can only work with integers. Also it lets you run tasks simultaneously (up to 8) just by using start <task> and stop <task> commands.

Here is a link to the dev program:

link

 

[fatbaby]

the $200 price tag scared me away

Might as well build robots

 

[Martin]

I played with legos all the time when I was a kid. I'd love to get one of these, but I heard they're quite expensive




<--recovering legomaniak

 

[Martin]

If only I could have had this as a kid.......

I was building houses and cars, but kids these days can build robots. No fair! *pout*






Oh well, it'll be the first thing I buy when I get a job

 

[ApacheXMD]

sure the 200 dollar price tag seems steep. and you can sure buy a microcontroller for a fraction of that, but the point is that it's LEGO. and along with the programmable brick you get a bunch of lego technic parts. That allows for easy and rapid development of ideas. Let's say all you want is a simple rover bot. If you were to build it from scratch, it would cost you a few more bucks, and a whole lotta time. But with Lego, it's about 5 minutes of snapping bricks together. You can try and retry things VERY quickly with a Mindstorms set.

But the RCX (the heart of the mindstorms kit) is limited somewhat. It only has 3 inputs and 3 outputs.

If you want to do some simple (and some not so simple) robotics projects then Mindstorms is a great way to get started. Then you can move onto other microcontrollers as your needs grow.

-patchy