Is a robotic dog made of Lego bricks guarding the cubicle next door? Hundreds of thousands of adults have discovered the Lego Mindstorms kit's addictive joys since the fall of 1998. They're making miniature slot machines, photocopiers, and Star Wars Droids. And it all started in Cambridge.
Another brick in the wall
Back in 1980, MIT professor Seymour Papert wrote a book entitled "Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas." It was partially about Papert's invention of the Logo programming language (children of the '80s: that's the one with the turtle). In 1990, the MIT Media Lab's Fred Martin and Mitchel Resnick published a paper about controlling Lego structures with Logo, and using electronic bricks to make robotic vehicles.
Now, Lego Mindstorms has a microprocessor that interacts with PCs. It's called RCX, and it was directly inspired by the MIT Programmable Brick, a teensy computer inserted into Lego pieces. The brick was developed by a Media Lab design team including Papert, Martin, and Resnick. This, too, was intended for kids. Ha!
Lego put RCX together with over 700 parts to create the Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System (RIS). The first 80,000 of them sold out in three months -- to an approximately 50/50 mix of kids and adults. Probably more adults, if you count all the sheepish grown-ups buying for "my, uh, 'nephew.'"
Lego wants to be free
Not that Etch-a-Sketch runs Windows, but Lego Mindstorms robots are perhaps the first truly open-source toys. It didn't take long for an enthusiastic Lego Mindstorms community to take RCX apart and put together compilers, the operating system legOS, and the NQC (Not Quite C) language. You can use Linux or your PalmPilot to tool around with Mindstorms robots. Lego doesn't officially support any of this, but unlike some toy-mongers, it doesn't sue everyone who treads on its territory.
Ready for a round of Six Degrees of Lego Mindstorms? Lego Mindstorms' RCX was inspired by a project out of MIT, which also hosts the Free Software Foundation, which champions open-source, which is the philosophy that created legOS, which runs on Lego Mindstorms. Take that, Kevin Bacon.
Mindstorms in a Nutshell?
We knew Lego Mindstorms had geek cachet when O'Reilly & Associates put out a book about it. "The Unofficial Guide to LEGOŽ MINDSTORMSTM Robots" sports a robotic rabbit on the cover and the tagline "Going Beyond What Comes in the Box." That includes third-party programming languages, legOS, and several wild robot projects. (Can I teach the tag-playing robot pair to team up on my cat?) The author, Jonathan Knudson, is from ... okay, New Jersey. But plenty of behind-the-scenes production labor happened in O'Reilly's Cambridge office.
The pre-Christmas bestseller lists at the MIT Press bookstore included the O'Reilly book and "Dave Baum's Definitive Guide to Lego Mindstorms." That's Dave Baum, inventor of the NQC language.
Back to basics
Of course, some Lego Mindstorms users don't mind using RCX on their PC. They don't all want books for building super-advanced projects. Some of them are simply what the MIT Press Bookstore's John Jenkins calls -- non-pejoratively, I promise -- "tinkerers." John, who got Mindstorms for Christmas, likes the artificial intelligence angle. Some want to build practical contraptions; John heard about someone who built a robot to sort his mail. It's only as complex as you want it to be -- remember, it was originally marketed to 12-year-olds. So it's fine to buy one for your ... um ... "nephew."
Jen Muehlbauer's column appears every Friday in digitalMASS. Her e-mail address is jen@englishmajor.com.