The lastest Lego Mindstorms, NXT is coming out in Augest this year, I hope the same time for Australia, It has bluetooth, a new “brain”, ultrasonic sensor (I made my own home-brew one for RIS 1,1.5&2). A sound sensor that enables the robot to react to sound commands, including sound pattern and tone recognition, I can’t wait to develop my own software for this. They say an improved light sensor that detects different colors and light intensity, not sure if this means an upgrading the the [kiddy] software. Boys use GUIs Men use code. Again they say that they improved the touch sensor to react to touch or release and allows robots to feel. But I mean we could do that before it gave us a raw value and we went with it. One really great thing is the “3 interactive servo motors feature inbuilt rotation sensors to align speed for precise control” Been waiting for this. And then they include 519 pieces (”hand-selected”, oh… lar..di..dar…), Probably a great thin is the bluetooth. (If you don’t have bluetooth you can use a USB2.0 cable.) I just hope that it has a fast processor, a decent amount of on board memory. (But I can always take it a part and add some more) What I would really like to see is battery time… 12 hours using all the devices… that would rule… and a dam DC input… (And possible aswell charging from the USB port…) A removable rechargable lithium-ion battery would rule. They are light and have no memory effect. One thing that people were wanting with Vision Command, was that they could plugin the camera into the RCX and the RCX would do the job of Vision Reconition. Not sure if we can hack this baby to use it’s USB2.0 port… maybe we would have to use a small resolution? My 233 could take 640×480 so if they include a processor like that they are fine. One thing that also is good is the upgrade from a 16-bit to a 32-bit processor. So that it can handle larger integer without resorting to functions that use arrays to mimic 32-bit integars. ROBOT magizine reviewed it. Overall I am going to buy one… and hack it to the max. :)

Steven Roddis