Lego Is Discontinuing Mindstorms
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As a now-successful robotics engineer, I was the target age when the first Lego mindstorms set came out. Due to the cost it had to be a combined birthday and Christmas present (still obviously very privileged). The simple scratch-like programming system that kit used was great for me as a tween learning robotics.
Today I am designing an open source farming robot as a non profit project! (See my profile)
The early history of Lego Mindstorms is interesting. I didn’t realize Seymour Papert was involved but that makes a lot of sense! Especially with the name Mindstorms:
I have colleagues that organize coserdojo sessions for young kids fully centered on the makeblock robots. You can program them in scratch to get started, but a push of the button gives you the equivalent Python code once the kids graduate from scratch.
I am surprised to see Lego cancel mindstorms, but it does make the decision easier…
In contrast, Mindstorms replaced the old LEGO/Logo system (which I was fortunate to use in high school), and was a big step forward in a number of ways most noticeably that you didn't have to be tethered to the computer.
LEGO owns BrickLink, as of a few years ago.
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.
OTOH now you can get https://www.amazon.com.au/LEGO-Classic-10717-Bricks-Piece/dp... very easily (and there are smaller sets that cost a lot less too)
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.
That’s LEGO’s game plan though X)
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.
The general LEGO system has also had decades of compatibility at this point...
The most recent iteration is based on SPIKE Prime. It's the same hub, but with slightly different firmware. The motors are and sensors are the same but in different colors.
All Mindstorms iterations (including the most recent) are untethered. As is SPIKE Prime.
Essentially this announcement is that they are discontinuing the consumer-facing branding, but continuing with the education product, SPIKE Prime. Both products are actually identical, minus a few firmware differences. The number of motors and sensors included in the box also differed.
I think this is the same part of my brain that still thinks getting a PDA is a good idea despite having had a smartphone for I don't know how many years now.
Is there a word for holding on to a desire which has entirely been satisfied with new but different solutions?
I never had a computer as a kid in the 90s. But I would go to electronics stores and play around with PCs - my most vivid memory was the large white and grey keyboards.
I now own a very expensive, large, white and grey keyboard :) (Leopold FC980C for you keyboard fans).
I think the design decisions can be educational. I'm sure mindstorms is full of compromises required to get a product to market under a certain price point (etc).
Aesthetic nostalgia maybe
Anyone who wants to see that happen for their children can get a robotics club added to their school. Tons of fun, not very expensive. Pretty easy to get corporate sponsorship.
Kids love it.
Whoa !
I wish there were cheaper alternatives. I'm from India, and it costs about 800 USD here, for the same set.
NASA has a kit for building a model of the robot probes they send to land and drive on Mars. It was priced about three thousand dollars before inflation struck.
I only had these things because my parents recognised my interests and bought things that were WAAAY too big for birthdays/xmas.
I had the conflagration of about 25 LEGO sets prior to Mindstorms. Perhaps that caused me to head over to EE/CS? I did have Big Trak though that could fire frickn laser beams. :)
- Even you as a privilege background, you had to join Birthday and Christmas,
- If a Raspberry Pi costs $30, why would each single motor at Lego cost $25? Why can’t we have an excellent Mindstorms set for $200?
It looks just like segmentation and extracting the dollar fro where it is, but wouldn’t the market be much bigger if it were a little more affordable?
Didn’t become a robotics engineer.
While I'm saddened by this news for nostalgic reasons, I personally believe that today's young learners are better served by the proliferation of hobby robotics platforms like Arduino/Raspberry Pi. Every summer camp I worked at would claim that Lego robotics teaches real-world engineering skills, while in reality the students were just happy to stay within the comfort zone of playing with Legos and using a block-based programming environment (one that has quite frankly gone from bad to worse to absolutely horrible with each product cycle). Also, FIRST Lego League does nothing meaningful to prepare students for FIRST - when I donated supplies and a few weeks of mentorship to my former high school's FIRST team, I was dismayed to see how much dead weight the team was carrying in students who participated in the middle school Lego league, who did not have even the basic coding/engineering skills to make any contribution to the high school team other than paying the membership dues.
Since you mentioned the raspberry pi, you can use one of those with the latest lego spike system as well via a pi HAT: https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/build-hat/
To me as a kid and well as someone a bit older who often pulls out legos to mock up mechanical systems before I dig into solidworks the programming of the robot was a bit secondary to getting the mechanics worked out, and legos are a super fast way to prototype a lot of things (though they do have their limitations for sure). While I'm not one for shielding young people from serious tools, a school or a summer camp might for insurance reasons, lego might still be the way to go.
That kind of just sound like middle school. The clubs and sports I was involved in were things I was very bad at.
6 years in and many people around me look up to and/or respect me and I always feel like they're making a horrible choice.
A decade ago, I was a student on the team, and I remember everyone doing a lot more with a lot less. We had to program microcontrollers with Stamp BASIC, pull reference books off the shelf, and go on epic debugging journeys. The team today was overall far less motivated, although the exceptional programming/technical skills of certain students was unlike anything we had 10 years ago, and it was this handful of students that pulled the entire team forward.
One time a parent of a notoriously lazy student asked me how they were doing, and I answered honestly that their kid doesn't do anything but play games on the Internet, and they would be better off using their after-school hours playing a sport or literally doing anything else. What followed was a vile and vitriolic rant about how their kid was the leader of the Lego robotics team, and maybe it's because you aren't assigning them the right work, and on and on. Just one decade ago, students can and did get kicked off the team for being lazy, but you can't deny anyone an opportunity these days...
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.
The quality of American parenting has taken a big nose-dive in 10 years...
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Robotics Discovery Set? The blue brick? It had a bunch of predefined things you could stitch together to make little programs directly via the brick's interface.
RIS 1.0 definitely had a programming interface via the serial IR tower.
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".
There was even some decent FOSS tooling that developed on top of Mindstorms: I used NXC (Not eXactly C, https://bricxcc.sourceforge.net/nbc/welcome.html) which was a C-like language for programming Lego Mindstorms. It looks like the last release of NXC was in 2011.
That version of the hardware was so old that it didn't even have non-volatile storage. Every time you changed the batteries, it would boot into a minimal ROM bootloader which was just powerful enough to download the rest of the firmware into RAM, via an infrared connection to your PC. That had the nice side effect of making the RCX very hacker-friendly, because it was almost impossible to permanently "brick" it (ha!).
Lego Mindstorms was one of the best creative learning tools you can give a child; my life started the day I stopped using the building manual and started building my own stuff by trial and error.
The world would be a better place if everyone grew up with the opportunities that I did. I wish schools would just let children do whatever with Lego instead of filling your day with restrictive lessons in loud classrooms.
See the book "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, And Powerful Ideas" by Seymour Papert. Free from MIT.
https://mindstorms.media.mit.edu
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language)
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_graphics
Now they could implement individual alarm workflows for their customers. But that was still nothing his customers could use themselves, because they still would have to know how to program.
But then he saw an ad for mindstorms in the Lego catalogue his son brought home from the toy store. That inspired him to write a completely new software. Windows based with a their own graphical programming environment embedded.
I have to admit, though, I never used Mindstorms and as far as I know he never bought mindstorms for his children either. ;)
And SPIKE web app[0,1] does not work in Firefox:
> Browser not supported
> Use Google Chrome to access the LEGO® Education SPIKE™ App.
[0] https://education.lego.com/en-us/downloads/spike-app/softwar...
I'd be very surprised if they weren't compatible with each other.
https://www.lego.com/en-in/service/help/spike_prime/spike-es...
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 solve your problems. Within the year I was getting bored of mathematics, and all I really wanted to do was take more CS classes....
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.
1. Choose your individual classes, which reserves a spot for you
2. Click the overall "Finalize your class selection"
3. All validations run, including both things like "are you taking the right number of credits" and "do you meet the prerequisites for each class"
Classes that were restricted to juniors and seniors opened up to everyone if they didn't fill up by the start of the semester. So I chose my classes and didn't finalize until the semester started. Muahaha.
In the modern era this is typically solved via these "your cart will only reserve your items for 15 minutes" type warnings, but back in the olden days when I was an undergrad, that level of technology wasn't widespread yet.
It got me really interested in robotics to the point where I decided I would move halfway across the world for college to get educated further in robotics. I did that and I am now a professional roboticist. None of that would’ve happened if it wasn’t for Lego Mindstorms. Sad to see it go. Their spike prime kit looks way too basic compared to how mature and extensible the mindstorms ecosystem is.
I suspect there are many of us out there... A very sad day indeed.
I’ve long had this hope of getting a Mindstorms set and working on it with my daughters someday (4 and 6).
Famously, LEGO has an extremely tight manufacturing tolerance that's around 10um [1]. Your 3d printer is much better than mine. :)
1. Page 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#cite_ref-Companyprofile_3...
very high end FDM printers have been getting down to sub 100 micron dimensional accuracy for many years now.
if you're sanding parts you probably have some low-hanging-fruit to eat tuning wise.
Main use case for me is to lay some track between rooms for kid's trains.
When I was in a freshman engineering class that used version 1 mindstorms kits a few years later, my fellow students were amazed at my understanding of how to build with the kits. It also help with another lab used LabVIEW.
-- Remainder of comment is a personal story --
Using this thing my dad gave me access to called "the World Wide Web", I eventually learned that people were making custom sensors for the RCX like distance sensors and proximity sensors.
The first website I found is still up 20+ years later and the design is delightfully unchanged (https://www.philohome.com/sensors.htm, https://www.philohome.com/mindstorms.htm)
Trying to follow these projects eventually led me to become frustrated with the block environment and I arrived at something called NQC (Not-Quite-C). It's a C-like language/environment for the RCX stock firmware.
Wait, stock, there are other firmwares??
Then I learned about something called "lejos" (a Java VM for Mindstorms) through a MacWorld magazine my dad left laying around, which is how I ended up starting to learn Java.
Next thing I picked up was the BASIC Stamp through the Parallax Boebot kit.
I eventually started going to a local robotics club (Chibots), which exposed me to even more stuff. One member was trying to start a business making AVR eval boards for hobbyists and gave me a few samples, which is how I picked up AVRs (Arduino was still a few years away). His website went offline a few years ago. Hope he's doing alright.
He and most of the club were using an environment for AVR called BASCOM AVR, which feels a lot like VB6, but for AVR. I couldn't afford the $80 it cost as a kid, so I ended up learning C because avr-gcc was free and open source software, which eventually let me to Linux and more.
Being a kid was fun, but I always had trouble relating to the other kids :)
https://education.lego.com/en-us/product-resources/mindstorm...
Even the bright colors look like something that's designed to educate small kids? The old sets had a "cool" vibe to them. Maybe that made them too gendered, but as a young boy, it certainly helped avoid the shame of "still" playing with lego.
Am I missing something, or does this Spike Prime thing look like less of a replacement and more of a completely different product with a different focus which also just happens to contain programmable lego motors?
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 getting a bit lucky and rigorously placing the bot at the beginning.
AKA, while the NXT/EV3/etc devices are capable of sensor feedback, few teams made use of it. Its likely all the FLL teams need for most of the competition is three motor forward/reverse.
PS: Maybe I sorta failed to respond to the main point, which is that the spike kits aren't there to be "cool" sitting on the shelf and excite kids who get them under the tree. They are mostly purchased by educational/FLL teams where the build instructions and/or goals are provided by a 3rd party.
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.
You have microswitches, photoelectric and magnetic sensors, motors and pneumatic actuators to name a few. It all came with a software to program it all in a flowchart like fashion.
I fondly remember unpacking a set at christmas and playing with it. Honestly, I think Fischertechnik had a huge impact on me and put me on the career path that I am now. While my last experience with Fischertechnik is more than a decade ago, the website seems like they haven't lost their spirit
Here is how it looked like: https://fischertechnik-blog.de/2022/09/26/welche-kindheitstr...
The factory must grow into real space.
http://www.technicopedia.com/8479.html
Still remember how instane it felt.
I remember that when constructing the truck I forgot to add in some gears so the claws didn't rise properly and I had to dissasemble the entire cabin again: my dad almost had to force me to do it because I was constructing it for so long that I was totaly tired and just wanted to be done with the damn thing.
This SPIKE Prime thing seems neat, but as others have mentioned, a bit bland. Hopefully LEGO comes out with some rad space robot themed sets at some point.
Does anyone know if LEGO has or is working on some sort of Minecraft style environment where you can build cool stuff, and then develop the programs and run them in the simulated environment? Then maybe you can build the machines IRL and run the same code to get the same behavior? Even a single player simulator would be pretty neat, though multiplayer would be ideal. Maybe what I'm hoping for is something like a MuJoCo for kids, and it seems like LEGO would be a perfect match to have a product like that.
The kits I use with my child are Engino Discovering STEM. Each kit lets you build a bunch of interesting, complex mechanical systems. It's not just a little better than Lego; it's in a different class for building robotic systems. It's also a lot cheaper.
What it needs, though, is a competent software platform. I'd love to have this integrated with something like the BBC Micro:bit.
My general feeling is that Lego is in cash cow mode. A lot of money flowing in, but weakening fundamentals.
We did things like write security systems (beam cross triggered alarms), or make little cars.
It was called "Lego LOGO" at the time, I believe. (confirmed: http://lukazi.blogspot.com/2014/07/lego-legos-first-programm...)
Don't worry hackers. Lego has a long history of integrating with computers. This isn't their first attempt and won't be the last.
I spent some time going through all of their basic examples in Rust, which was just delightfully silly.
I’m sure someone will come out with a new product range that fills that gap. My eldest kid is 8, I was planing to introduce her to Mindstorms in the next year or so…
IMhO, they could do well by combining programmable elements with thematic sets, say add programmable motion to a haunted house. They have already tip-toed down this path, eg. the roller coaster has an optional motor function. However the pure approach of Mindstorm clearly has too narrow a market.
(We also have Boost but it’s much more limited IMO - my biggest gribe is that LEGO has so many incompatible systems which is ironic)
My investment in a bunch of these devices will be devalued a lot :(
Since then I've proven that things like ESP32 Arduino etc actually work to teach small kids real robotics. Mindstorms was always a gimmick.
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!
Hopefully this will make market room for alternatives that give better value for money for STEM kids.
Sure, they are ending a particular line - but not the concept. It's just moving more to the cloud I guess.
I would guess Mindstorms gives more of an intro to programming, while Erector is better for mechanical engineering.
(also, hey! I was that weird kid at Handmade Seattle last year who asked to shake your hand :) )
It was a pleasure to meet you!
P.S. My mom told me that I couldn't handle the tiny screws used to put the Erector sets together. She was wrong :-) I spent endless hours building things with it.
Mecanno brand has programmable robots, but not the range of sensors that Mindstorms had.
Sometimes I'll get from ebay one of the battered metal boxes they came in. They make nice nostalgic decorations.
The web site and order system is in German, but I've been able to talk to their friendly customer service in English. Then there's the matter of shipping outside of Europe... but it's still much easier than scraping parts together from vintage Meccano vendors with circa-1995-style web sites.
I remember having some Erector sets as a kid in the '90s (they had merged with Meccano long before, and the choice of which brand to appear on which set seems to have been random since then), but these days the official Meccano/Erector selection is almost non-existent -- there are maybe a dozen small self-contained model vehicle kits, and you can't order generic kits or parts in bulk. It is rather sad -- these brands were once used for serious engineering prototyping and scientific work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser#Use_of_M...
The official Meccano-brand sets here in Argentina are indeed very limited.
Any educational tool/toy must be public domain or free license.