The next generation of Lego Mindstorms will have USB, Bluetooth, Ultrasound, sound, light and touch sensor, servo motors + open sourced firmware.

All for the price of an XBOX (not XBOX 360)

With open source firmware, we will soon no doubt see a wifi extension to the robotic platform (yeah, it's a 'toy', but it's robotic nonetheless);

You can control the robot from your computer or program it to run autonomously.

Imagine the possibilities. You can hook this robot to your home wifi network and run it with your mission control software on your PC. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do with this. You can have this robot to ride on a vacuum cleaner, or patrol your cat or simply impress your guess with your dancing robots to the dunes of "London Calling".

I'm getting one kit for 'work' so that we can get used to programming closely to hardware. You never know, we might switch to doing robotics in a couple of years.

There's a starter kit for programming Mindstorms using .Net which you can find at http://msdn.microsoft.com/coding4fun/lego/default.aspx, although for this type of task, I prefer using Ruby with Win32 binding.


The future looks bright I gotta wear shades.