Splish Splash

Hoorah! I now own one of the finest toys imaginable - a Lego Mindstorms kit!

Mindstorms NXT is a lego robotics kit which revolves around a 32-bit ARM7 microprocessor, known as the NXT Intelligent Brick. This receives input via 4 input sensors: a touch sensor, a sound sensor, a light sensor and an ultrasonic sensor. In turn, the brick can output to 3 servo motors, as well as its own screen and speaker.

You program it via a graphical interface on a PC (which is actually quite intuitive) but, since the firmware for the brick is open-source, there is a plethora of other languages which have been ported to NXT.

It's lots of fun :-) Here's a short demo of a basic robot I built in the beginners' tutorial.

The robot waits until its ultrasonic sensor detects an object within 20 inches. If one appears, it moves forward until it touches it. It then waits for me to clap before picking up the ball and returning to the start. On the way back, it uses its light sensor (which can detect differences in light intensities and, consequently, distinguish colours) to sense when it reaches the black line. Then it drops it.

It's all still rather linear at the moment but I can soon knock together some programs that use loops and conditionals to vary the behaviour. I'll experiment with a few languages, too. Java seems a popular one but something like Prolog should be rather more interesting... If I can get it playing games intelligently then that'll be quite something.

Overall, I'm thrilled to bits with it :-D It's been a long time since I played with Lego - there were nowt like this when I were a lad! I think £180 is perhaps a little expensive but it is extremely well designed, making it a joy to use. With everything being Lego, all the pieces are modular so creating your own designs is straighforward. The brick, sensors and servos can't all be worth £180 but the general niftiness of the whole concept makes the whole become greater than the sum of its parts.

A must for all those closet robotics geeks out there!