Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

brickfanatics.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 199 posts

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#141

Post by Nullabillity »

lupire wrote: post #114
Nullabillity wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spike Prime and 51515 (the final Mindstorms generation) seem to be basically the same thing (which isn't new, back in the NXT times you had NXT and NXT Education Edition). I'd be very surprised if they weren't compatible with each other.

They aren't compatible. https://www.lego.com/en-in/service/help/spike_prime/spike-es...

That page only mentions the long-discontinued NXT and EV3, not 51515 (the set that the article says is being discontinued now). 51515 wasn't compatible with NXT/EV3 either.

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#143

Post by primitivesuave »

sleepybrett wrote: post #87
primitivesuave wrote: post #55

I got the original Lego Mindstorms 1.0 kit for my 8th birthday - there was no programming interface, just a way to select one of 256 possible sequences of high-level actions the robot would perform in a loop. I paid for my first car by working at summer camps that taught kids how to use the Mindstorms 2.0 and NXT, and built my first 3D printer with Lejos ( https://lejos.sourceforge.io/ ), Lego Technic parts and a tin…

I also had the original mindstorms set from 1996-98, the compute module was the big yellow brick (i think the RCX), you interface with it via a little serial IO tower. There was absolutely a programming interface. It was visual and very scratch like and it was evolved eventually into the programming environment that came with the ev3. It did require a pc to use I think there was a cdrom in the box that contained the…

Totally agree with you on the benefits of Legos as a rapid prototyping tool, which is certainly an impulse I have as well. My concern is that a lot of kids get stuck on the Lego Mindstorms toy model of things, and aren't exposed to anything else. I actually used to run summer camps to teach about technology, and the main issue I faced with teaching serious tools was finding/training the instructors.

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#144

Post by jacobolus »

lupire wrote: post #106
xrd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Legos and by extension the company that makes them, and I still believe what you are saying, that everyone will have to buy new stuff, is exactly the reason the LEGO company is making this choice. They don't make a penny (unless they are somehow involved in a secondary market which probably has much lower margins and higher costs) unless you buy something new, and migrating to a new ecosystem makes so much sen…

Did you know that today's LEGO bricks are compatible with bricks manufactured in 1975? There is no "migrating" here. LEGO correctly noted that Mindstorms was not very popular with the consumer market, and too complicated for the education market, so Prime is a vastly simpler product that's more accessible from education.

Lego Technics motors, battery packs, remote controls, etc. from a few years ago are incompatible with the current ones, because they decided they wanted to raise the prices across the board and tie everything to smart phone apps.

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#145

Post by jacobolus »

adastra22 wrote: post #91
sleepybrett wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if thats true. Lego as a corporation has been fairly low on the fuckery index.

LEGO kits used to be composed of fully interchangeable parts. While that is still true of the core build, there are now unique parts in every kit. This is driven by sales.

Nearly all of the parts are designed around a small set of common interfaces. The main change is that have moderately increased the number of interfaces vs. a few decades ago and there are more small decorative parts (and thus higher overall part counts) in most large current sets.

Designing models that are comparable to the first-party models is a more difficult challenge for kids than it used to be, but there is also a much larger pool of extremely skilled builders than there used to be (both adults and children). But there’s nothing stopping anyone from using the current pieces in older-style projects, and the older pieces couldn’t be used in quite as large a variety of models as the current ones.

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#146

Post by hoherd »

matheweis wrote: post #139

In my opinion they tried to hard to make it easy. The scratch-like interface is a nice idea but limited and probably expensive for LEGO to create and maintain. They should have gone the Arduino direction and made it so that you could run Python or C++ directly on the bricks. Kids are smarter than they get credit for, it’d work great!

FWIW you can run Linux on the EV3 and access the sensors and motors using a variety of programming languages.

https://www.ev3dev.org/

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#147

Post by [deleted] »

lupire wrote: post #106
xrd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Legos and by extension the company that makes them, and I still believe what you are saying, that everyone will have to buy new stuff, is exactly the reason the LEGO company is making this choice. They don't make a penny (unless they are somehow involved in a secondary market which probably has much lower margins and higher costs) unless you buy something new, and migrating to a new ecosystem makes so much sen…

Did you know that today's LEGO bricks are compatible with bricks manufactured in 1975? There is no "migrating" here. LEGO correctly noted that Mindstorms was not very popular with the consumer market, and too complicated for the education market, so Prime is a vastly simpler product that's more accessible from education.

[deleted]

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#148

Post by kaashif »

primitivesuave wrote: post #138
lupire wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids, right? How dare they not know everything before they are taught!

I was there to teach them, the problem was most of them didn't have the intrinsic motivation to learn. Everyone was excited to be assigned some work, but only a handful of students actually went through and finished the tasks they were given, while most were content to simply get on their phone or play an online game. A decade ago, I was a student on the team, and I remember everyone doing a lot more with a lot less.…

Everything is so accessible now that the kids with a desire to learn do so at a rate that far exceeds anything possible with some computer magazines and a shitty implementation of BASIC, which was all some people had when they were kids back in the day.

Of course, that means that the kids that did end up programming back then were self-selected to be really motivated. If not, they wouldn't have done it. There's a serious selection bias if you're looking at kids who programmed then and now, the population of programming children is much larger (and much more average) than it was decades ago.

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#149

Post by javajosh »

I had this nightmare vision where children "program" a robot by showing it's electronic eye a schematic representation of it's desired motion and/or reactions, from the manual, and the on-board AI converts the image into a working program. Although now that I write it out, it's perhaps not very nightmarish.

Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms

#150

Post by mwint »

lacker wrote: post #100

I have many fond memories of Mindstorms... In college I started out a math major. The first CS class I took was a robotics class based on Mindstorms, as a sophomore. I remember it was restricted to only juniors and seniors, but it sounded cool, and I found a bug in the course registration system that let me sign up anyway. It was a great class. It's fun that in computer science there are so many different ways to sol…

> I found a bug in the course registration system that let me sign up anyway.

Hah, that’s an awesome filter… if I ever start a college, signing up for any 200+ level CS class will require spoofing a POST request.

Post reply on HN