Subject:
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Hot Mindstorms NXT News from MacWorld
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Wed, 11 Jan 2006 19:21:45 GMT
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(This message also appears on my blog:
http://www.brickpile.com/2006/01/11/hot-mindstorms-nxt-news-from-macworld/)
At MacWorld I was talking to the LEGO Education (Dacta) guy there and he told me
some interesting things about Mindstorms NXT that I hadn’t heard anywhere else.
I already knew that the FIRST LEGO League would be allowing use of both the old
style Mindstorms RCX and the new NXT in the coming season. But since the NXT
uses different sensors and motors, the question of backward compatibility has
been an area of much speculation in the online LEGO forums such as the LUGNET
Robotics group. According to my source, LEGO Education will offer a cable that
can connect legacy Mindstorms sensors and motors to the new NXT. He didn’t have
specifics about the electrical connections, but it would be a cable that had the
2×2 brick connector used by the current Mindstorms on one end, and the offset
RJ12 connector used by NXT on the other.
Also I was wondering about the ongoing life of the original Mindstorms once NXT
is available. He was surprised when I told him that LEGO Shop-at-Home has
already discontinued their Mindstorms Robotics Invention System kits (which
include the 2.0 version of the RCX) but he assured me that LEGO Education will
continue to sell their Mindstorms sets (which use the 1.0 version that has a 9V
DC power port), even after the NXT becomes available. I believe this is to avoid
forcing teachers to replace their entire inventory with NXT sets.
Also, I asked about the power adapters for the NXT bricks. He said that there
will not be a power adapter port in the NXT sold by LEGO Education, but that
they would offer a special rechargeable battery pack which can be used instead
of the usual 6 AA cell batteries. Teachers and AFOL’s who love the power port
will be disappointed by this news, but at least the battery pack may have better
life than the equivalent set of AA batteries would.
Finally, he confirmed that the NXT units can talk to one another using Bluetooth
(but not using USB, as the NXT’s USB port is “slave only”), and that they will
have a single address space rather than the current RCX design which segments
the memory into five partitions for different programs.
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Message has 3 Replies:
 | | Re: Hot Mindstorms NXT News from MacWorld
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| (...) Bill, thanks for the report. The above is what I think most of us speculated but now you have confirmed, multiple NXT's form a piconet! I suspect from the last comment that perhaps the initial firmware only runs one program at a time that has (...) (19 years ago, 11-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics, FTX)
| | | Re: Hot Mindstorms NXT News from MacWorld
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| Bill Ward writes: > Also, I asked about the power adapters for the NXT bricks. He said > that there will not be a power adapter port in the NXT sold by LEGO > Education, but that they would offer a special rechargeable battery > pack which can be (...) (19 years ago, 14-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics)
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