Throwback Thursday: Lego Mindstorm Robotics Invention System

Who gives a rats ass about gadgets from yesteryears…

FIRST Robotics competition uses these for the younger crowd. Pretty nice introduction before you start building big multi thousand dollar robots in high school

@Why

Go drop dead!!! BGR always has article like this every Thursday!!! And people like them!!! Stupid Troll!!!

Oh man, I really wanted one of these sets when they first came out.
Also, the image is of the newer NXT model, the older models look nothing like that.

I love throwback thursdays.

whoa i dont remember this thing but it kinda looks like what if johnny 5 and wall-e had a baby.

oh god
my late childhood

this was kind of the crescendo of the 90s

using lego as a kind of 21st century tinker toys with a programmable power-giving mother brick.

actually the best part about the entire system was the way the programming software worked, with little conditional “blocks”, like literally colored blocks you snapped together to program it. IT WAS LIKE VISUAL PROGRAMMING DONE RIGHT, the closest something ever came to that again is the android app inventor, TEN YEARS LATER

but at the time i was more interested in screwing around with methods of locomotion, different configurations of tank treads and drive systems. Rack and pinion drives were hard as hell to implement.

i got the first set for christmas of 98, and got the discovery set, the mind vision set, and the mars exploration set later. (hell i even got the movie maker set)

NXT kind of lost some of the freedom of the originals. Technic bars are more rigid but less maleable

C’mon, 1998 is way back?? There’s PLENTY of other gadgets & devices that came out before then…. BG, it’s time to dig up some old skool PDA’s and electronics; and why the heck have I not seen a calculator watch on this feature yet?? WHERE’S THE JUSTICE, I TELL YA!!!

Still, it is pretty awesome that Mindstorms gets a shout-out; this was THE gift for both lego fans and techie geeks when it came out. Nice choice.

Why is that robot leading with his crotch? Or her crotch?

Texas A&M (and I would imagine some other universities) still use the NXT in intro engineering courses. In some classes, the Robolab software that is supplied by LEGO is used but some classes use a much more robust version that is simply a toolbox for LabVIEW made by National Instruments. It’s a great tool because it exposes students to software and programming that is used later in college, and in industry, and is still fun.

Looks like the love child of Johnny 5 and an original Gameboy.

At Drexel, we still use it as the capstone project for ENGR 102 (a second term freshman engineering course). Simple, effective, and educational. Still accomplishes a lot, although its damn tough to get the tasks done with it. We had to navigate around a ring with red and blue “cancerous” cells and only “kill” (press) the red cancer cells, leaving the blue ones alone. Thank god freshman year’s over.

Wall-E? Anyone?

That robot is pregnant.
The robot mum called it Android.

I LOVED THIS! I STILL HAVE MINE!

I was in a kids robotics camp shortly after these were released (because I’m a huge nerd, apparently) and there was a competition to see whose robot would reign supreme by having robot wars – pushing the opposing robot out of the ring, or pushing a can of pepsi that was placed in the middle of the ring to the outside.

My robot went berserk and just started spinning out of control, knocking loose a light sensor that was still attached by a wire, causing the can of pepsi to be split open. I won.

Best invention ever.

A pretty good flashback on lego..
Kinda..makes me go for the RCX again.
@ rest of u trolls
: go drown… atleast u will stop being such smart asses like commenting on the pin holes of the bot.

Boy Genius keep it up..

I remember this from our tech class! Wow, now I feel old!

I am like this ropot

I need this ropot