Yes, you can run a debian based distro on them, so they can be programmed in Python or whatever. I guess the question is if they will stop being supported by platforms such as Scratch, which is a very popular way to program them these days
Sad to see this as someone who enjoyed these as a kid and entering robotics competitions based off of them; hopefully the new products will keep the spirit alive.
There was even some decent FOSS tooling that developed on top of Mindstorms: I used NXC (Not eXactly C, https://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/welcome.html) which was a C-like language for programming Lego Mindstorms. It looks like the last release of NXC was in 2011.
Similar story here. I remember getting my first exposure to embedded development at a relatively young age through brickOS (https://brickos.sourceforge.net/), which was a complete replacement operating system for the original Mindstorms RCX (predating the NXT).
That version of the hardware was so old that it didn't even have non-volatile storage. Every time you changed the batteries, it would boot into a minimal ROM bootloader which was just powerful enough to download the rest of the firmware into RAM, via an infrared connection to your PC. That had the nice side effect of making the RCX very hacker-friendly, because it was almost impossible to permanently "brick" it (ha!).
I grew up using mindstorms in FLL and I just began coaching a team this year. I'm pretty impressed with the new Spike Prime, and although it has its quirks, over all I'd say it's a good improvement over the last generation, plus I get to teach the kids python which has honestly been a blast!
My first real programming was NQC (Not Quite C, probably related to NXC?). I owe it my programming abilities.
Lego Mindstorms was one of the best creative learning tools you can give a child; my life started the day I stopped using the building manual and started building my own stuff by trial and error.
The world would be a better place if everyone grew up with the opportunities that I did. I wish schools would just let children do whatever with Lego instead of filling your day with restrictive lessons in loud classrooms.
School & independent teams have spent $$$ buying lego parts and it is still sad to see things deprecated when they could have easily upgraded the "cpu" and kept things compatible.
Spike Prime and 51515 (the final Mindstorms generation) seem to be basically the same thing (which isn't new, back in the NXT times you had NXT and NXT Education Edition).
I'd be very surprised if they weren't compatible with each other.
That page only mentions the long-discontinued NXT and EV3, not 51515 (the set that the article says is being discontinued now). 51515 wasn't compatible with NXT/EV3 either.
I have too on my TAZ, but they either require a bunch of sanding to get the fit right or they are far too loose. I wonder if the tolerances on the resin printers are accurate enough.
extrusion tolerances can be tuned very finely on an FDM printer if you're using a geared extruder head and a well-tuned profile with a well known filament.
very high end FDM printers have been getting down to sub 100 micron dimensional accuracy for many years now.
if you're sanding parts you probably have some low-hanging-fruit to eat tuning wise.
Currently 3D printinga lot of Lego rail on my FDM printer. Although not perfect, it does snap onto original rail and to its 3D printed peers. Lego pieces do snap to the dimples as well, although too tight.
Main use case for me is to lay some track between rooms for kid's trains.
P.S. My mom told me that I couldn't handle the tiny screws used to put the Erector sets together. She was wrong :-) I spent endless hours building things with it.
The most easily available Meccano-compatible system still in production is the Swiss brand Stokys: https://www.stokys.ch/de-ch/home/
The web site and order system is in German, but I've been able to talk to their friendly customer service in English. Then there's the matter of shipping outside of Europe... but it's still much easier than scraping parts together from vintage Meccano vendors with circa-1995-style web sites.
I remember having some Erector sets as a kid in the '90s (they had merged with Meccano long before, and the choice of which brand to appear on which set seems to have been random since then), but these days the official Meccano/Erector selection is almost non-existent -- there are maybe a dozen small self-contained model vehicle kits, and you can't order generic kits or parts in bulk. It is rather sad -- these brands were once used for serious engineering prototyping and scientific work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser#Use_of_M...
I'm pretty sure I had this as a kid. It had very memorable stamped steel girders . I think we built some sort of ferris wheel (not sure which exact model) and I was really unhappy with how slow/weak it was. it was a real depressing moment. Never quite forgot it. Took a good three and half decades before I finally learned how to make high torque spinning things (motor torque got better, easier, and cheaper).
I bought three big Meccano kits on closeout years ago. They lie in wait for robotification. If anyone has pointers to how to bring them to life with appropriately-sized motors and batteries and remote control, I'd be grateful.
Spike Prime is their new education branding. This article is kind of misleading since they've been sort of phasing out the Mindstorms branding in favor of a broader education initiative for a while. Spike Prime might not be for very young children, but I'd say a precocious 2nd or 3rd grader could definitely program it.
I'm looking at their Spike Prime stuff now, and nothing I'm finding seems that... interesting? I got my start in programming with the Mindstorms NXT set (this thing: http://www.robotreviews.com/reviews/lego-mindstorms-nxt-8527...), where you got all the parts and instructions needed to build a walking, programmable lego robot. The Spike Prime set looks like... some motors, some sensors, the controller brick, and some parts, but nothing to inspire, no instructions for a cool bipedal robot build, or robot arm, or anything to get the imagination flowing.
Even the bright colors look like something that's designed to educate small kids? The old sets had a "cool" vibe to them. Maybe that made them too gendered, but as a young boy, it certainly helped avoid the shame of "still" playing with lego.
Am I missing something, or does this Spike Prime thing look like less of a replacement and more of a completely different product with a different focus which also just happens to contain programmable lego motors?
I'm a bit out of touch with FLL (my kids aged out), but its not surprising. Little of winning a FLL competition is related to the robotic performance. The team that wins the robotic portions won't necessarily do well overall.
Given that, and the sophistication of many of the teams, and the way the competitions are designed. The best teams are usually just doing some form of preprogrammed dead reckoning sequence and getting a bit lucky and rigorously placing the bot at the beginning.
AKA, while the NXT/EV3/etc devices are capable of sensor feedback, few teams made use of it. Its likely all the FLL teams need for most of the competition is three motor forward/reverse.
PS: Maybe I sorta failed to respond to the main point, which is that the spike kits aren't there to be "cool" sitting on the shelf and excite kids who get them under the tree. They are mostly purchased by educational/FLL teams where the build instructions and/or goals are provided by a 3rd party.
Using sensors in the robotic competition was unreliable. A simple change in lighting from your development set to the competition board would screw everything up. I thought FLL was great, but as a robotics competition it's actually harder in some ways than the higher FIRST competitions because lego's are small and very finnicky.
It's more geared towards organized lessons or competitions. In something like FLL, kids are given problems to solve on a board (move this from here to there, trigger this mechanism, etc) and they need to use the robot to solve it. So they are not building bipedal robots but tools geared toward a specific "mission" (an FLL term). When my kid did it the team needed to do everything, including building the robot, and needed to collaborate since generally each member of the team had a mission and the robot needed to do all of them in a certain time. This often meant returning home, swapping out an attachment and starting again, so a design that was quickly modified on the board was an advantage.
It's all arguably less fun, but certainly easier to sell to institutions designing curriculum.
EDIT: One thing I want to add is that though I also played with technic, I saw FLL attract kids who wouldn't otherwise be attracted to STEM because FLL had a social aspect. I felt it was a great way of introducing kids to robotics and programming because they could do it with friends and work towards some goal. I loved technic, but it was a solo pursuit and though that worked for me, it doesn't work for everyone. So when I say Spike is "less fun", I mean that it probably doesn't attract the kid who wants to build a robot, but it certainly did work in bringing in kids who would never play with technic at all.
Right, that seems plausible to me. That confirms my impression that Spike fills a completely different niche than Mindstorms, and that the people who would get into programming and/or mechanical engineering through Mindstorms won't through Spike. That's a bit sad IMO.
'Mindstorm' are more suited for over 10 yo children. For younger children the 'Boost' line (17101 set) may be a good choice (there is nothing said about it in the announcement). Also there is plenty of chinese clones of the previous generations of Mindstorm (and maybe the reason for the discontinuation).
You have microswitches, photoelectric and magnetic sensors, motors and pneumatic actuators to name a few. It all came with a software to program it all in a flowchart like fashion.
I fondly remember unpacking a set at christmas and playing with it. Honestly, I think Fischertechnik had a huge impact on me and put me on the career path that I am now. While my last experience with Fischertechnik is more than a decade ago, the website seems like they haven't lost their spirit
Started with Fischertechnik as well. The "Computing" set came out before LEGO Mindstorms. The flowchart programming tool was called "Lucky Logic", but it could also be programmed in C.
I had tremendous success teaching 7-9 year olds with Piper (https://www.playpiper.com/). It is trivially easy to add moving parts and teach the core concepts of electronics, but the box itself is not great as a robotics platform. In my particular case, the kids also had access to a laser cutter and CAD software that would automatically generate the 2D shapes and joining slots.
It’s a shame but I can see how it’s a harder sell than the nth iteration of a scene from say Harry Potter.
IMhO, they could do well by combining programmable elements with thematic sets, say add programmable motion to a haunted house. They have already tip-toed down this path, eg. the roller coaster has an optional motor function. However the pure approach of Mindstorm clearly has too narrow a
market.
They aren’t discontinuing it because its hard to sell in that space. They are retiring it in favor of their newer offering in the space (LEGO Education Spike Prime). They also have, for programmable robotics, the younger-kid focussed LEGO Boost. Plus they have at least one DUPLO set aimed at what I think of as the “tactile coding toy” space (where instructions are represented as physical configurations of objects), DUPLO Coding Express.
I was given a Lego RCX kit for Christmas in about 98 at the age of 12. It was my first exposure to “proper programming” with its visual flowchart based language (I was already playing around with HTML). I spent days building various inventions with that set. It very much set me in the path I’m still on today.
I’m sure someone will come out with a new product range that fills that gap. My eldest kid is 8, I was planing to introduce her to Mindstorms in the next year or so…
That's somewhat bittersweet. The company I now work for and lead was inspired by mindstorms. Our founder had written a DOS based software for alarm receiving centers. Even back then he and his prime customer were unsatisfied with the restricting logic of managing alarms by only having a few choices how to react to an alarm. Usually show some text, and have a person call someone and then write up a protocol. So he build some sort of programming environment for alarm receiving software.
Now they could implement individual alarm workflows for their customers. But that was still nothing his customers could use themselves, because they still would have to know how to program.
But then he saw an ad for mindstorms in the Lego catalogue his son brought home from the toy store. That inspired him to write a completely new software. Windows based with a their own graphical programming environment embedded.
They're likely shifting focus to a different programmable block product line, namely SPIKE Prime. So it's more of a changing of the guard than the end of robotic educational LEGO.
I'm not sure if bittersweet is the right word, english is not my first language. But I think the bitterness of Mindstorms ending reminding me of the beginnings of our company could be considered sweet. So I would say it's a bittersweet moment.
I have to admit, though, I never used Mindstorms and as far as I know he never bought mindstorms for his children either. ;)
Although they claim to not be abandoning the idea and the trademark altogether, I don't really understand the reasoning behind not using such a seemingly strong brand. Mindstorms appeared pretty popular with hobbyists and in education.
Lego is similar to Nint€ndo and Di$ney, they do not support the free culture, instead their lawers fight agains to free software projects or charity events.
Any educational tool/toy must be public domain or free license.
They released a new generation not long ago (last year?). Sounded like it wasn't warmly received initially but later they were sold out. Something to do with that?
As a now-successful robotics engineer, I was the target age when the first Lego mindstorms set came out. Due to the cost it had to be a combined birthday and Christmas present (still obviously very privileged). The simple scratch-like programming system that kit used was great for me as a tween learning robotics.
Today I am designing an open source farming robot as a non profit project! (See my profile)
The early history of Lego Mindstorms is interesting. I didn’t realize Seymour Papert was involved but that makes a lot of sense! Especially with the name Mindstorms:
There is a different feeling when programming things in the physical world, especially if you only programmed digital creatures before :) Give it a try if you haven't, Lego is a great non-intimidating way of getting into it, otherwise Arduino is pretty simple for programmers to grok as well.
Generally arduino, or raspberry pi. Learning to light up an LED and move a servo motor, plus read some kind of sensor are great ways to start to see how code can interact with the real world.
I was looking for a Christmas present robot kit for my 8 year old and still on the fence between mindstorms or the makeblock robots. (The Codey Rockey in particular, but the mbot looks really nice too)
I have colleagues that organize coserdojo sessions for young kids fully centered on the makeblock robots. You can program them in scratch to get started, but a push of the button gives you the equivalent Python code once the kids graduate from scratch.
I am surprised to see Lego cancel mindstorms, but it does make the decision easier…
I had some fun with this device - https://shop.m5stack.com/collections/m5-hobby/products/rover... - the general platform is geared more towards IoT, sensors and what you can do with software, but perhaps that's even a more relevant direction than just motion.
The Spike system seems like an odd side-step to me. There are some minor improvements, but not really enough to justify breaking compatibility and making people repurchase everything from scratch.
In contrast, Mindstorms replaced the old LEGO/Logo system (which I was fortunate to use in high school), and was a big step forward in a number of ways most noticeably that you didn't have to be tethered to the computer.
I love Legos and by extension the company that makes them, and I still believe what you are saying, that everyone will have to buy new stuff, is exactly the reason the LEGO company is making this choice. They don't make a penny (unless they are somehow involved in a secondary market which probably has much lower margins and higher costs) unless you buy something new, and migrating to a new ecosystem makes so much sense if that's the goal.
Did you know that today's LEGO bricks are compatible with bricks manufactured in 1975?
There is no "migrating" here. LEGO correctly noted that Mindstorms was not very popular with the consumer market, and too complicated for the education market, so Prime is a vastly simpler product that's more accessible from education.
They are, but unlike in 1975, LEGO now makes it very difficult for people to actually buy just bricks. They won't sell plain packs of bricks to shops unless they buy large numbers of the themed sets.
I used to buy Technix sets (sp?) and spend days playing with gear and pulley and wheel and motor systems. I don't think a single time in all my childhood did I ever sit down with a Lego set and build some themed toy that they suggested on the box.
All I really want is bricks, plates, shafts, couplers, gears, pulleys, motors, sensors, and assorted things. I'll come up with the projects myself. They don't seem to want people like me, since I have not been able to buy that kind of kit since the 80s.
Lego Technics motors, battery packs, remote controls, etc. from a few years ago are incompatible with the current ones, because they decided they wanted to raise the prices across the board and tie everything to smart phone apps.
LEGO kits used to be composed of fully interchangeable parts. While that is still true of the core build, there are now unique parts in every kit. This is driven by sales.
Nearly all of the parts are designed around a small set of common interfaces. The main change is that have moderately increased the number of interfaces vs. a few decades ago and there are more small decorative parts (and thus higher overall part counts) in most large current sets.
Designing models that are comparable to the first-party models is a more difficult challenge for kids than it used to be, but there is also a much larger pool of extremely skilled builders than there used to be (both adults and children). But there’s nothing stopping anyone from using the current pieces in older-style projects, and the older pieces couldn’t be used in quite as large a variety of models as the current ones.
EV3 was largely compatible with NXT, and while NXT wasn't directly compatible with RIS they sold separate adapter modules. 51515 was a huge regression compared to the rest of the series.
The general LEGO system has also had decades of compatibility at this point...
Just to clarify, Mindstorms has had many iterations. I believe what you're referring to is Mindstorms 1.0 (RCX). It's had three successors in the past 20 years or so - NXT, EV3, and most recently, RIS.
The most recent iteration is based on SPIKE Prime. It's the same hub, but with slightly different firmware. The motors are and sensors are the same but in different colors.
All Mindstorms iterations (including the most recent) are untethered. As is SPIKE Prime.
Essentially this announcement is that they are discontinuing the consumer-facing branding, but continuing with the education product, SPIKE Prime. Both products are actually identical, minus a few firmware differences. The number of motors and sensors included in the box also differed.
As I grown man who has built actual robots with all the skills to do embedded programming and mechanical engineering to make robots... I'm still envious of Mindstorms and yet never purchased any despite having the funds to do so.
I think this is the same part of my brain that still thinks getting a PDA is a good idea despite having had a smartphone for I don't know how many years now.
Is there a word for holding on to a desire which has entirely been satisfied with new but different solutions?
I never had a computer as a kid in the 90s. But I would go to electronics stores and play around with PCs - my most vivid memory was the large white and grey keyboards.
I now own a very expensive, large, white and grey keyboard :)
(Leopold FC980C for you keyboard fans).
Was going to say the same thing. Worst case you buy it and it doesn't do what you need (itch) and in that case you can gift it to someone.
I think the design decisions can be educational. I'm sure mindstorms is full of compromises required to get a product to market under a certain price point (etc).
My kid was selected into the robotics club this year, and they are using the Spike Prime kit. Seems like a decent set all things considered for younger kids. My child is in 5th grade and first year robotics. Probably wouldn't invest into it if your child is middle-school or older, but from what I've seen of it a very good kit.
Anyone who wants to see that happen for their children can get a robotics club added to their school. Tons of fun, not very expensive. Pretty easy to get corporate sponsorship.
5 is appropriate for Lego, but in my experience from volunteering at a teach-kids-to-code club, is almost always to young for programming. If only because they can't read yet, but also their eye for detail (I have seen two 7-year olds spend 10 minutes and still not see the difference between "Step();" and "Step()" when these two lines were right below each other).
NASA has a kit for building a model of the robot probes they send to land and drive on Mars. It was priced about three thousand dollars before inflation struck.
I can trace my success as a software engineer to the 'too big' presents my parents bought me for xmas/birthday. I had a desktop computer of my own as 10 year old in 1992, and a laptop, a Powerbook 190 with a 16 grayscale screen, in 1995. A 33.6k modem also in 1995 (and a second phone line because my parents got sick of me tying up the main line).
I only had these things because my parents recognised my interests and bought things that were WAAAY too big for birthdays/xmas.
As long as you went to MIT, majored in mechatronics, and made a 3-legged pogo bot, it's all good. :)
I had the conflagration of about 25 LEGO sets prior to Mindstorms. Perhaps that caused me to head over to EE/CS? I did have Big Trak though that could fire frickn laser beams. :)
Yup combined Christmas and birthday presents and additionally forfeit any money I received from relatives back in the year 2000. Had to fight for it and made to feel guilty on how much it cost.
Mindstorms has a long compelling history before LEGO, that includes cybernetics, the Logo programming language, turtle graphics, Braitenberg vehicles, and the rise of the MIT Media Lab.
See the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert. Free from MIT.
This is sad. Lego Mindstorms played a huge role in my life trajectory. I discovered RCX and NXT in middle school, absolutely loved building stuff with them and went to robotics competitions.
It got me really interested in robotics to the point where I decided I would move halfway across the world for college to get educated further in robotics. I did that and I am now a professional roboticist. None of that would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Lego Mindstorms. Sad to see it go. Their spike prime kit looks way too basic compared to how mature and extensible the mindstorms ecosystem is.
I also entered a Mindstorms competition at my school and it had a similar impact on me. To this day I look back on that competition as one of my best childhood memories and I think it was a large part of why I went on to eventually study computer science.
I suspect there are many of us out there... A very sad day indeed.
RIP
My Robotics professor developed ROBOLAB with Lego + LabView. In return, Lego funded part of the robotics department. We had the most amazing Lego lab. Bins of every shape piece you could ask for. It was really a childhood dream come to life.
When they first announced the Mindstorms kit, I was obsessed with the idea, but we were a Mac family. My parents somehow obtained a Robolab kit from the Lego educational catalog, which did run on Mac. I had so many good memories of building with that kit, but there were a number of plans I had found for Mindstorms that uses parts not included with the Robolab kit.
When I was in a freshman engineering class that used version 1 mindstorms kits a few years later, my fellow students were amazed at my understanding of how to build with the kits. It also help with another lab used LabVIEW.
Does anybody remember any of the Mindstorms flash games on the old Lego game website? Those were pretty great. I especially liked the game where you tracked the spies in the vaguely Eastern European city of Telgrade.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 250 ms ] threadThere was even some decent FOSS tooling that developed on top of Mindstorms: I used NXC (Not eXactly C, https://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/welcome.html) which was a C-like language for programming Lego Mindstorms. It looks like the last release of NXC was in 2011.
That version of the hardware was so old that it didn't even have non-volatile storage. Every time you changed the batteries, it would boot into a minimal ROM bootloader which was just powerful enough to download the rest of the firmware into RAM, via an infrared connection to your PC. That had the nice side effect of making the RCX very hacker-friendly, because it was almost impossible to permanently "brick" it (ha!).
Lego Mindstorms was one of the best creative learning tools you can give a child; my life started the day I stopped using the building manual and started building my own stuff by trial and error.
The world would be a better place if everyone grew up with the opportunities that I did. I wish schools would just let children do whatever with Lego instead of filling your day with restrictive lessons in loud classrooms.
I'd be very surprised if they weren't compatible with each other.
https://www.lego.com/en-in/service/help/spike_prime/spike-es...
Famously, LEGO has an extremely tight manufacturing tolerance that's around 10um [1]. Your 3d printer is much better than mine. :)
1. Page 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#cite_ref-Companyprofile_3...
very high end FDM printers have been getting down to sub 100 micron dimensional accuracy for many years now.
if you're sanding parts you probably have some low-hanging-fruit to eat tuning wise.
Main use case for me is to lay some track between rooms for kid's trains.
I would guess Mindstorms gives more of an intro to programming, while Erector is better for mechanical engineering.
(also, hey! I was that weird kid at Handmade Seattle last year who asked to shake your hand :) )
It was a pleasure to meet you!
P.S. My mom told me that I couldn't handle the tiny screws used to put the Erector sets together. She was wrong :-) I spent endless hours building things with it.
Mecanno brand has programmable robots, but not the range of sensors that Mindstorms had.
Sometimes I'll get from ebay one of the battered metal boxes they came in. They make nice nostalgic decorations.
The web site and order system is in German, but I've been able to talk to their friendly customer service in English. Then there's the matter of shipping outside of Europe... but it's still much easier than scraping parts together from vintage Meccano vendors with circa-1995-style web sites.
I remember having some Erector sets as a kid in the '90s (they had merged with Meccano long before, and the choice of which brand to appear on which set seems to have been random since then), but these days the official Meccano/Erector selection is almost non-existent -- there are maybe a dozen small self-contained model vehicle kits, and you can't order generic kits or parts in bulk. It is rather sad -- these brands were once used for serious engineering prototyping and scientific work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser#Use_of_M...
The official Meccano-brand sets here in Argentina are indeed very limited.
Even the bright colors look like something that's designed to educate small kids? The old sets had a "cool" vibe to them. Maybe that made them too gendered, but as a young boy, it certainly helped avoid the shame of "still" playing with lego.
Am I missing something, or does this Spike Prime thing look like less of a replacement and more of a completely different product with a different focus which also just happens to contain programmable lego motors?
Given that, and the sophistication of many of the teams, and the way the competitions are designed. The best teams are usually just doing some form of preprogrammed dead reckoning sequence and getting a bit lucky and rigorously placing the bot at the beginning.
AKA, while the NXT/EV3/etc devices are capable of sensor feedback, few teams made use of it. Its likely all the FLL teams need for most of the competition is three motor forward/reverse.
PS: Maybe I sorta failed to respond to the main point, which is that the spike kits aren't there to be "cool" sitting on the shelf and excite kids who get them under the tree. They are mostly purchased by educational/FLL teams where the build instructions and/or goals are provided by a 3rd party.
It's all arguably less fun, but certainly easier to sell to institutions designing curriculum.
EDIT: One thing I want to add is that though I also played with technic, I saw FLL attract kids who wouldn't otherwise be attracted to STEM because FLL had a social aspect. I felt it was a great way of introducing kids to robotics and programming because they could do it with friends and work towards some goal. I loved technic, but it was a solo pursuit and though that worked for me, it doesn't work for everyone. So when I say Spike is "less fun", I mean that it probably doesn't attract the kid who wants to build a robot, but it certainly did work in bringing in kids who would never play with technic at all.
You have microswitches, photoelectric and magnetic sensors, motors and pneumatic actuators to name a few. It all came with a software to program it all in a flowchart like fashion.
I fondly remember unpacking a set at christmas and playing with it. Honestly, I think Fischertechnik had a huge impact on me and put me on the career path that I am now. While my last experience with Fischertechnik is more than a decade ago, the website seems like they haven't lost their spirit
Here is how it looked like: https://fischertechnik-blog.de/2022/09/26/welche-kindheitstr...
https://www.fischertechnik.de/en
The factory must grow into real space.
I spent some time going through all of their basic examples in Rust, which was just delightfully silly.
IMhO, they could do well by combining programmable elements with thematic sets, say add programmable motion to a haunted house. They have already tip-toed down this path, eg. the roller coaster has an optional motor function. However the pure approach of Mindstorm clearly has too narrow a market.
(We also have Boost but it’s much more limited IMO - my biggest gribe is that LEGO has so many incompatible systems which is ironic)
I’m sure someone will come out with a new product range that fills that gap. My eldest kid is 8, I was planing to introduce her to Mindstorms in the next year or so…
Now they could implement individual alarm workflows for their customers. But that was still nothing his customers could use themselves, because they still would have to know how to program.
But then he saw an ad for mindstorms in the Lego catalogue his son brought home from the toy store. That inspired him to write a completely new software. Windows based with a their own graphical programming environment embedded.
I have to admit, though, I never used Mindstorms and as far as I know he never bought mindstorms for his children either. ;)
Any educational tool/toy must be public domain or free license.
As a now-successful robotics engineer, I was the target age when the first Lego mindstorms set came out. Due to the cost it had to be a combined birthday and Christmas present (still obviously very privileged). The simple scratch-like programming system that kit used was great for me as a tween learning robotics.
Today I am designing an open source farming robot as a non profit project! (See my profile)
The early history of Lego Mindstorms is interesting. I didn’t realize Seymour Papert was involved but that makes a lot of sense! Especially with the name Mindstorms:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Mindstorms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindstorms_(book)
I have colleagues that organize coserdojo sessions for young kids fully centered on the makeblock robots. You can program them in scratch to get started, but a push of the button gives you the equivalent Python code once the kids graduate from scratch.
I am surprised to see Lego cancel mindstorms, but it does make the decision easier…
In contrast, Mindstorms replaced the old LEGO/Logo system (which I was fortunate to use in high school), and was a big step forward in a number of ways most noticeably that you didn't have to be tethered to the computer.
LEGO owns BrickLink, as of a few years ago.
There is no "migrating" here. LEGO correctly noted that Mindstorms was not very popular with the consumer market, and too complicated for the education market, so Prime is a vastly simpler product that's more accessible from education.
OTOH now you can get https://www.amazon.com.au/LEGO-Classic-10717-Bricks-Piece/dp... very easily (and there are smaller sets that cost a lot less too)
All I really want is bricks, plates, shafts, couplers, gears, pulleys, motors, sensors, and assorted things. I'll come up with the projects myself. They don't seem to want people like me, since I have not been able to buy that kind of kit since the 80s.
That’s LEGO’s game plan though X)
Designing models that are comparable to the first-party models is a more difficult challenge for kids than it used to be, but there is also a much larger pool of extremely skilled builders than there used to be (both adults and children). But there’s nothing stopping anyone from using the current pieces in older-style projects, and the older pieces couldn’t be used in quite as large a variety of models as the current ones.
The general LEGO system has also had decades of compatibility at this point...
The most recent iteration is based on SPIKE Prime. It's the same hub, but with slightly different firmware. The motors are and sensors are the same but in different colors.
All Mindstorms iterations (including the most recent) are untethered. As is SPIKE Prime.
Essentially this announcement is that they are discontinuing the consumer-facing branding, but continuing with the education product, SPIKE Prime. Both products are actually identical, minus a few firmware differences. The number of motors and sensors included in the box also differed.
I think this is the same part of my brain that still thinks getting a PDA is a good idea despite having had a smartphone for I don't know how many years now.
Is there a word for holding on to a desire which has entirely been satisfied with new but different solutions?
I never had a computer as a kid in the 90s. But I would go to electronics stores and play around with PCs - my most vivid memory was the large white and grey keyboards.
I now own a very expensive, large, white and grey keyboard :) (Leopold FC980C for you keyboard fans).
I think the design decisions can be educational. I'm sure mindstorms is full of compromises required to get a product to market under a certain price point (etc).
Aesthetic nostalgia maybe
Anyone who wants to see that happen for their children can get a robotics club added to their school. Tons of fun, not very expensive. Pretty easy to get corporate sponsorship.
Kids love it.
Whoa !
I wish there were cheaper alternatives. I'm from India, and it costs about 800 USD here, for the same set.
NASA has a kit for building a model of the robot probes they send to land and drive on Mars. It was priced about three thousand dollars before inflation struck.
I only had these things because my parents recognised my interests and bought things that were WAAAY too big for birthdays/xmas.
I had the conflagration of about 25 LEGO sets prior to Mindstorms. Perhaps that caused me to head over to EE/CS? I did have Big Trak though that could fire frickn laser beams. :)
- Even you as a privilege background, you had to join Birthday and Christmas,
- If a Raspberry Pi costs $30, why would each single motor at Lego cost $25? Why can’t we have an excellent Mindstorms set for $200?
It looks just like segmentation and extracting the dollar fro where it is, but wouldn’t the market be much bigger if it were a little more affordable?
Didn’t become a robotics engineer.
See the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert. Free from MIT.
https://mindstorms.media.mit.edu
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Braitenberg_vehicle
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Papert
It got me really interested in robotics to the point where I decided I would move halfway across the world for college to get educated further in robotics. I did that and I am now a professional roboticist. None of that would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Lego Mindstorms. Sad to see it go. Their spike prime kit looks way too basic compared to how mature and extensible the mindstorms ecosystem is.
I suspect there are many of us out there... A very sad day indeed.
I’ve long had this hope of getting a Mindstorms set and working on it with my daughters someday (4 and 6).
When I was in a freshman engineering class that used version 1 mindstorms kits a few years later, my fellow students were amazed at my understanding of how to build with the kits. It also help with another lab used LabVIEW.