Very creative! I have the MindStormsNXT, and while it is a lot of fun I have to say that it IS NOT worth $250.00. The controlling unit is like a PalmII with BlueTooth but even less powerfull storage/processing-wise. Someone needs to come out with a chassis with the type of I/O and electric motors that the MindStormsNXT has, but for $50 and an interface to PocketPC's. That would make for a truly cool robot with decent processing power and storage, and for less than $200 you could get a decent PPC to run the thing.
Out of the box, the Mindstorms software isn't all that great -- it runs a custom bytecode format that only allows very limited computation and data storage. But the processor itself isn't bad; it's a 48MHz ARM with 64KB of RAM and 256KB of flash, which is pretty respectable (although not at the PocketPC level, true). Now that the firmware source code available, it should be possible to write much more powerful software in C or assembler.
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Very creative! I have the MindStormsNXT, and while it is a lot of fun I have to say that it IS NOT worth $250.00. The controlling unit is like a PalmII with BlueTooth but even less powerfull storage/processing-wise. Someone needs to come out with a chassis with the type of I/O and electric motors that the MindStormsNXT has, but for $50 and an interface to PocketPC's. That would make for a truly cool robot with decent processing power and storage, and for less than $200 you could get a decent PPC to run the thing.
Out of the box, the Mindstorms software isn't all that great -- it runs a custom bytecode format that only allows very limited computation and data storage. But the processor itself isn't bad; it's a 48MHz ARM with 64KB of RAM and 256KB of flash, which is pretty respectable (although not at the PocketPC level, true). Now that the firmware source code available, it should be possible to write much more powerful software in C or assembler.