Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 11 years and 11 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

For Christmas, Santa brought my daughter and I the LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 buildable/programmable robotics kit. Sweet! Of course as luck would have it, LEGO just announced the next generation of the Mindstorms line at CES this week, but that won’t damper our enthusiasm for building robots and programming them to do our will! 😀

My daughter has prior experience with the Mindstorms kit, having gone to a robotics camp over the summer, so while I was figuring out how to put together the quick start robot, she was already installing the software on her laptop and working on her first program (too bad the software won’t run on her Surface).

After writing the obligatory Hello World program, I fleshed it out a bit as I got familiar with the development environment and soon had our robot displaying animated graphics on the LCD screen, playing sounds, and moving around. Very cool!

my Hello World program for the Mindstorms robot

We’re both looking forward to seeing what we can do with the NXT and its sensors. The new EV3 kits will support iOS and Android out of the box, something the NXT doesn’t. I was able to install LegoDrive on my jailbroken iPhone 4S, however, and drive my quick start robot around by tilting my phone (the dogs were not amused). Maybe I’ll even get my Raspberry Pi involved in our tinkering somehow.

I, for one, welcome our new LEGO robot overlords.