They are currently hiring engineers to build their new API services and event-based systems.
Sure, they are ending a particular line - but not the concept. It's just moving more to the cloud I guess.
Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
181–190 of 199 posts
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They are, but unlike in 1975, LEGO now makes it very difficult for people to actually buy just bricks. They won't sell plain packs of bricks to shops unless they buy large numbers of the themed sets.
I used to buy Technix sets (sp?) and spend days playing with gear and pulley and wheel and motor systems. I don't think a single time in all my childhood did I ever sit down with a Lego set and build some themed toy that they suggested on the box.
All I really want is bricks, plates, shafts, couplers, gears, pulleys, motors, sensors, and assorted things. I'll come up with the projects myself. They don't seem to want people like me, since I have not been able to buy that kind of kit since the 80s.
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#183I am wondering if it has to do with chip shortages and supply chain issues, due to that I can imagine that the current offering became unsustainable.
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
FYI if you want to get beefy on the compute side, they make a raspberry pi HAT for integration with the lego spike stuff: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/build-hat/
Now if only they made a Raspberry Pi for purchase...
I have 4xRaspberry Pi 4 8 GB for sale from Sweden if you’re interested in buying!
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#185Well, good riddance, I guess. The software side of this product has been completely mismanaged and community-hostile for a long time, and the hardware has always been overpriced.
Hopefully this will make market room for alternatives that give better value for money for STEM kids.
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#186Bummer, I feel like Mindstorms landed right in that gap for me where I was a bit too old for them when they first came out (in high school, already having a blast with web programming), and now I have a two year old who builds giant Duplo castles, has conversations with our household robots, wears robot pajamas, and I'm super excited for them to age into robotics toys. This SPIKE Prime thing seems neat, but as others…
Well there's Arduino simulators, and Minecraft education has multiple options for coding (blocks or JavaScript). I don't know about any Lego robot-style simulations, though.
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
At what age is it appropriate? My kid is going to be 5 soon and loves playing with Legos. Thanks
5 is more than old enough. Basically any time after they stop putting things into their mouths.
5 is appropriate for Lego, but in my experience from volunteering at a teach-kids-to-code club, is almost always to young for programming. If only because they can't read yet, but also their eye for detail (I have seen two 7-year olds spend 10 minutes and still not see the difference between "Step();" and "Step()" when these two lines were right below each other).
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#188I 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 joined FIRST with very high hopes - I had been programming in C++ for several years by the time I reached high school, and had built small robots at home (and also participated in our middle school Lego robotics team).
I quit after two months. Our team was dominated completely by the engineer parents/mentors and a couple of "wunderkind" (aka children of the engineer parents). Outside of the select few, most people were completely brushed off and just sat in an empty room dicking around. The parents were too competitive and did a lot of the work, the stakes were too high for them, so failure wasn't allowed, so nobody learned anything. You either joined an expert or were "dead weight".
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm looking at their Spike Prime stuff now, and nothing I'm finding seems that... interesting? I got my start in programming with the Mindstorms NXT set (this thing: http://www.robotreviews.com/reviews/lego-mindstorms-nxt-8527... ), where you got all the parts and instructions needed to build a walking, programmable lego robot. The Spike Prime set looks like... some motors, some sensors, the controller brick, and som…
I'm a bit out of touch with FLL (my kids aged out), but its not surprising. Little of winning a FLL competition is related to the robotic performance. The team that wins the robotic portions won't necessarily do well overall. Given that, and the sophistication of many of the teams, and the way the competitions are designed. The best teams are usually just doing some form of preprogrammed dead reckoning sequence and g…
Using sensors in the robotic competition was unreliable. A simple change in lighting from your development set to the competition board would screw everything up. I thought FLL was great, but as a robotics competition it's actually harder in some ways than the higher FIRST competitions because lego's are small and very finnicky.
Re: Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spike Prime is their new education branding. This article is kind of misleading since they've been sort of phasing out the Mindstorms branding in favor of a broader education initiative for a while. Spike Prime might not be for very young children, but I'd say a precocious 2nd or 3rd grader could definitely program it.
I'm looking at their Spike Prime stuff now, and nothing I'm finding seems that... interesting? I got my start in programming with the Mindstorms NXT set (this thing: http://www.robotreviews.com/reviews/lego-mindstorms-nxt-8527... ), where you got all the parts and instructions needed to build a walking, programmable lego robot. The Spike Prime set looks like... some motors, some sensors, the controller brick, and som…
It's more geared towards organized lessons or competitions. In something like FLL, kids are given problems to solve on a board (move this from here to there, trigger this mechanism, etc) and they need to use the robot to solve it. So they are not building bipedal robots but tools geared toward a specific "mission" (an FLL term). When my kid did it the team needed to do everything, including building the robot, and needed to collaborate since generally each member of the team had a mission and the robot needed to do all of them in a certain time. This often meant returning home, swapping out an attachment and starting again, so a design that was quickly modified on the board was an advantage.
It's all arguably less fun, but certainly easier to sell to institutions designing curriculum.
EDIT: One thing I want to add is that though I also played with technic, I saw FLL attract kids who wouldn't otherwise be attracted to STEM because FLL had a social aspect. I felt it was a great way of introducing kids to robotics and programming because they could do it with friends and work towards some goal. I loved technic, but it was a solo pursuit and though that worked for me, it doesn't work for everyone. So when I say Spike is "less fun", I mean that it probably doesn't attract the kid who wants to build a robot, but it certainly did work in bringing in kids who would never play with technic at all.