NI Announces LabVIEW Toolkit for LEGO Mindstorms NXT

National Instruments announced today that it has created a LEGO Mindstorms NXT toolkit for direct interfacing between the kit and its powerful LabVIEW software. If you're one of the lucky few to own a copy of LabVIEW (most folks don't want to drop the $4k for it), then you will have the ability to directly control and program the NXT brick via LabVIEW, create front panels that interface with the brick, and create native blocks that others can use in their LabVIEW programs.

For the hobbiests that are trying to do things on the cheap, perhaps Monday's post on the Visual LEGO software project might be more useful. However, I imagine that this annoucement will open up a whole range of possibilites of using Mindstorms NXT in the college classroom, since many schools already have site liscenses for LabVIEW.