Since 1998, LEGO ’s Mindstorms products have generated a veritable legion of young robot builders, and the company’s NXT is the most significant update to its unique robot-building kit to date. The kit has, in fact, been incorporated as the grade-school level component of Dean Kamen’s For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST) science competition, wherein students build robots that compete in mini soccer and other mini forms of arena-based sports.

One might ask itself what is a review of a Lego set doing on an IT oriented web site. Well, this is not the Lego we remember from 15 years ago, this is a high tech robotics set based on Lego. The set contains 577 pieces, of which most are based on Lego Technic. I must admit that there are some pretty strange parts (can?t really call them bricks) for someone like me who didn?t play with Lego for years, but they all follow the same principle and it?s easy to catch on. The essence of this set are NXT parts: NXT brick, touch sensor, sound sensor, light sensor, ultrasonic sensor, servo motors and NXT software. The NXT brick is the brain of the whole set, it?s a pretty large brick that gets the input from the sensors and run the servos based on the programming. Inside it there is a 32bit ARM7 processor with 256KB of flash memory and 64KB of RAM. It connects to outer world through a USB port or a Class II 2.0 Bluetooth device. It has four input ports (for sensors) and 3 output ports (for servos) and a monochromatic 100×64 pixel LCD display and a small loudspeaker. It gets power from six AA batteries or a rechargeable battery pack that?s sold separately.

There are four buttons that help configuring the brick. The touch sensor works very simple, it can tell you when its sensing area has been pressed, released or bumped. It?s rudimentary, but with some imagination can become very useful. The sound sensor doesn?t do much but measure the level of sound, either in decibels or adjusted decibels. Again, it?s not revolutionary, but with imagination you can do wonders. For example you can program your robot to do something when you clap your hands. The light sensor has a monochromatic eye that just tells you what the light level in the area is. For example it can be used to make your robot follow a line. The last but not the least is the ultrasonic sensor. It measures the distance to the nearest object in front of it with a precision of +/- 3cm using ultrasound. It works on the same principle as a bat or radar and can make your robot detect walls or obstacles. All these sensors are useless if your robot can?t react to the information in collects and that?s where the servos come in. The three servos are pretty versatile as you can adjust the rotation speed and can rotate with a precision of 1 degree. You can also use them as rotation sensors.