Gundam model kit

Customer Reviews
Impressive evolution for MindStorms
My NXT set just arrived by FedEx this afternoon. I'm a parent of two (6 and 3-year old) so this is mainly for me for now. I was an early adopter of the first generation of Mindstorms, so naturally I pre-ordered the NXT.

LEGO Mindstorms NXT


I've played with it for two hours, so these are my initial impressions:
- the new motors are Wonderful -- they work as motors or servos (you tell them which angle to go to). They look futuristic and robot-y
- it comes with an ultrasound distance sensor -- whoa that's neat!
- All of the sensors are "slick-looking", and seem to work very well.
- the brick display is quite nice, but the interface is a bit niggly. Lots of nested menus. My 3 year-old managed to delete the built in demo program by button twiddling. It was easy to restore, though.
- the box itself (the "out of box experience") is disappointing. You have to punch out some quarter-circles to allow it to hinge, but they're poorly serrated, so the tears come out ugly. The inner boxes are hard to open so you end up messing those up. In short, the previous mindstorms box was a great long-term storage solution. This one is going in the trash. As a first impression, it's pretty poor.
- back to the good: there's a "quick-start guide" that gets you building a simple robot that is run by a built in demo program. It's perfect: not difficult, but not trivial -- it makes noises and moves around. The kids were enchanted.
- the "powered by LabView" programming environment seems halfway between the nerd-y LabView system that you could buy from Dacta and the totally bozo thing bundled with the old Mindstorms. It doesn't have that "rocket scientist" feel of the old LabView environment, which is both good (it's more self-guided) and bad (I don't see how to zoom out so that I can see complex programs all at once, for example.

All in all, this thing is very impressive, has lots of staying power, and since it supports MacOS X, I'll actually use it, and will most likely pull out my old MindStorms and combine parts. Thanks, Lego -- keep up the great work!

Features:
• Intelligent brick with 32-bit microprocessor; more memory and flash
• Three interactive servo motors features built-in rotation sensors that aligns speed for precise control and new sound patterns and tones
• 577 specially selected LEGO TECHNIC elements for sturdy and durable building and improved functionality and movement
• Icon-based drag-and-drop program building environment
• 6 AA batteries required which is not included

Product Description
Bow to the next generation of LEGO Mindstorms now, with a 32-bit processor, redesigned sensors, Bluetooth and more.






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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Sure, Mindstorms NXT is a toy, but it is an important toy, like a piano or a chemistry set. It's one of those items that engages an imagination and possibly opens doors to new interests.


Since our future is surely to be shared with robots--it's already started happening, just look at Roomba--those robots will need, at least initially, humans to program and maintain them. Those people, years from now, will likely remember their experiences with Lego Mindstorms.

Mindstorms NXT "challenges" from top: Tribot, RoboArm, and Spike.