Gadgetory

hey I'm Scott Stein and I am NOT a robotics expert but maybe I'd like to be maybe you'd like to be maybe you've heard of Lego Mindstorms which is a programmable robotics kit the Lego makes well Lego Mindstorms ev3 is coming out September 1st and is going to be compatible with iOS and Android you'll actually be able to use apps to control these robots that you build that's a new development for Mindstorms now the kit that we've got here early look at Lego Mindstorms ev3 doesn't have that capability yet but I did try to put together the very first robot in the kit for myself the tracker and it took me a little bit of time but I did get there what you get in the kit for $349 is a whole bunch of pieces you get enough to build not just one robot but multiple robots and more depending on whatever instructions you can find on the included software that's available for mac and pc and the future app that's going to be available on Android and iOS it tells you step by step instructions it also gives you the opportunity to program this robot yourself and what I mean by program is it's got an A 9 processor in this main brick it's got a variety of in-and-out ports it's got a color sensor it's got a touch sensor it's got IR control all that stuff you can control via sort of like an object-oriented programming where you can take each element that you want to program for each motor and drag and drop into this interface and then download it right here into the Mindstorms now that's pretty complicated and I admit I didn't get that far with it but I'll be playing around with it a little bit more setting up the very first unit the tracker robot is what you get the instruction manual for in the box and if you only want to go through the programming you can still use this as a little remote control cool device here and do some fun stuff with it there are four different channels you can program buttons here to do various things this included robot that's pretty basic but there are other robots that include a big mech version and a lot of things that shoot little pellets and have pincer claws and legs and all sorts of other stuff this is really just this is kind of like weak sauce for the robot building set but I was proud to build this one this little main unit here which runs on double-a batteries also has a USB port and an SD card slot the SD card slot to hold extra files that you might download into it like programs you want to run and the USB could actually connect optionally to Wi-Fi put this little sucker connected to the Internet wirelessly I'm not even sure why you'd want to do that but I'm sure people will come up with uses for it it's really much more versatile than you realize and I'm gonna have to spend some time getting more in depth with it but it's a lot of fun and it's not that hard to build with Lego Mindstorms ev3 will be out this fall I'm Scott Stein and that's a quick look at lego mindstorms ev3