Lego Mindstorms





Ever since my kids were small they played with Legos.  Now my oldest daughter is in college and my son is in high school living with their mother in another state.  I loved Legos because they allowed young mindes to create things quickly with out any hand tools. I decided to buy two sets of Lego Mindstorms for my son and I.  My son has always expressed to me that he wanted to program a game.  I wanted him to get the experience at an early age in programming.



So after getting my order of Mindstorms and two books from Amazon I opened the box and started building the first robot in the tutorial that came from Lego.



Building the robot was pretty straight foward as the Lego instructions were so easy to follow that even a cave man like myself could do it. From my background in manufacturing and mechanical design I can really appreciate the engineering and tolerances that go into the Lego product.  Here you hav all of these plastic parts and you can build almost any structure without using glue, nails or any hand tools, just your fingers.



I did have problems getting the programming software to run on my MacBook Pro at first.  I did my first program for the robot on my virtual PC. My virtual PC had problems connecting through the Mac host to my robot using Bluetooth so I downloaded programs using the USB cable that came with the set.



Ideally I wanted to connect directly to my robot with Bluetooth so I set out to find out why the Lego NTX programming software would not install correctly on my Mac.  What I could out was that version 10.6 of OS X had problems with the software.  I fixed these problems and got the software running natively on my Mac and now I can create programs for my robot and load them using Bluetooth from my Mac.



I will post more of my Lego adventures soon.

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