A New Year and another bout of CES madness! Considering that men never grow up and that all geeks have been brought up with LEGO®, playing with them before they could walk; LEGO Group’s latest product announcement is bound to cause some serious lusting… I’m pretty certain it’ll be relegating 250+ cm (100+ inch) flat-panel displays to second place for a lot of 2006 Christmas lists! ;)
From the press release it is quite apparent the robot is an advanced piece of kit:
The heart of the new system is the NXT brick, an autonomous 32-bit LEGO microprocessor that can be programmed using a PC, or for the first time in the retail offering, a Mac. After building their robots, users create a program within easy-to-use yet feature-rich software, powered by LabVIEW from National Instruments.
Downloading programs to an invention is easy. Users with Bluetooth®-enabled computer hardware can transfer their programs to the NXT wirelessly, or anyone can use the included USB 2.0 cable to connect their computer to the NXT for program transfer. The robot then takes on a life of its own, fully autonomous from the computer. The inclusion of Bluetooth technology also extends possibilities for controlling robots remotely, for example, from a mobile phone or PDA.
The little guy is going to be available online at www.LEGOshop.com and at selected electronics retailers come August 2006 for a fairly reasonable US$249.99 or CAD$379.99. Despite LEGO being a European, or more specifically a Danish company, there is nothing regarding the price of the NXT in Europe. However an educated guess of should put it somewhere between €200 to €250. :D
Awesome+++
Now I *really* wish my laptop had bluetooth.
Comment by smithy_dll — 05:29:31 UTC on the 19th of January, 2006
I am smug in the fact that both my cellphones (Sony Ericsson k600i & v600i) have BlueTooth connectivity. :D The next (hopefully sooner than later) computer upgrade, BlueTooth will be on the list of “must haves”. :D
Comment by Jonathan Stanley — 19:41:03 UTC on the 19th of January, 2006
The Lego® Company has still got it.
After reading about the NXT in SHS`’ blog back in January and reading about it’s great features such as having an AVR microcontroller embedded in it, I couldn’t think the Lego® Company could get much better. This all changed a few da…
Trackback by Thoughts of a mechatronic student — 04:58:04 UTC on the 25th of June, 2006