Robotics, Mindstorm

Lego Mindstorms is a line of Lego Group products combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears, axles, beams, and pneumatic parts) to build robots and other automated or interactive systems. more...

Lego Mindstorms is marketed commercially as the Robotics Invention System (RIS). It is also sold and used as an educational tool, originally through a partnership between Lego and the MIT Media Laboratory , . The educational version of the products is called Lego Mindstorms for Schools, and comes with the ROBOLAB GUI-based programming software.

Lego Mindstorms may be used to build a model of an embedded system with computer-controlled electromechanical parts. Almost all kinds of real-life embedded systems, from elevator controllers to industrial robots, may be modelled using Mindstorms.

There is a strong community of professionals and hobbyists of all ages involved in the sharing of designs, programming techniques, and other ideas associated with Lego Mindstorms.

The original Mindstorms RCX was released in 1998. In 2006, Lego announced a next-generation Mindstorms system called NXT, centered around a new programmable brick. The Lego Mindstorms NXT is due for release in August 2006.

RCX

The first generation of Lego Mindstorms was built around a brick known as the RCX. It contains a Renesas H8/300 microcontroller as its internal CPU. The brick is programmed by downloading a program (written in one of several available programming languages) from a PC or Mac to the brick's RAM via a special infrared (IR) interface. After the users starts a program, an RCX-enabled Mindstorms creation may function totally on its own, acting on internal and external stimuli according to the programmed instructions. Also, two or more RCX bricks can communicate with each other through the IR interface, enabling inter-brick cooperation or competition. In addition to the IR port, there are three sensor input ports and three motor output ports (also usable for lamps, etc). There is also an LCD that can display the battery level, the status of the input/output ports, which program is selected or running, and other information.

Read more at Wikipedia.org