Review of Lego Mindstorms Interfacing

Zac Soden reviews Lego Mindstorms Interfacing THE LEGO Mindstorms Robotics Invention System is the most advanced construction toys to date and has been amazingly successful, opening the LEGO market to a whole new audience of builders, both young and old. Being a fan of all things LEGO, I had to get one and so at Christmas 1999 I was the proud owner of a RIS 1.5. The system provided many hours of enjoyment, however, as many older builders discovered, the limitations of the RCX programmable brick in advanced applications soon become quite evident. LEGO Mindstorms Interfacing Author: Don Wilcher Publisher: McGraw-Hill Rating: 4/5 Notes: Super-complex Mindstorms, CD-ROM included It is at this point that one should pick up a copy of LEGO Mindstorms Interfacing. The book takes up where LEGO left off, beginning with a chapter on wireless basics and proceeding on to topics such as developing GUIs, electromechanical controls interfacing, client-server controllers, sensor interfacing techniques and much, much more. Actually, as I reached most of the way through the book, I found myself thinking 'Wow, what a cool application - but what could I possibly use it for!' The most useful part of the book, in my opinion, was the wealth of technical information provided on interfacing to the RCX. There are many different experiments with corresponding electronic circuit designs located throughout the book, all of which can be constructed by a novice using a breadboard and varying numbers of components. There are many sensor and other input applications, covering both advanced connection of existing LEGO sensors and the construction and use of custom sensing devices. Also included is much information of outputs - from simple relay switches to advanced PMOSFET outputs. There is much presented in the way of RCX programming methods and languages, including Visual Basic, NQC, LASM and IC4 to name a few. Whilst this is a strong point of the book, I feel that the author could have chosen not to cover so many different and unpopular programming languages, instead using the space to further expand on the powerful primary languages such as NQC and Visual Basic. I must admit that I was quite disappointed by the lack of any real advanced mechanical designs. Those presented are just extensions of the robot designs from the RIS 'Constructopedia' and are not really very appropriate at all, even if they are only for demonstrating how the programming and interface methods work. Whilst I do realise that the book was probably written to focus mainly on software and interfacing, hardware is just as important and some advanced hardware tips should be included. Although necessary to perform most of the projects, the CD-ROM that comes with LEGO Mindstorms Interfacing is seemingly bare - indeed it only has 25.3 MB of data on it. The data is sorted nicely into a bunch of folders, one which contains the setup programs for advanced programming applications and the others containing pre-written code for use with these programs. The mechanical designs presented in the book, although simple and presented in a number of semi-exploded views, would have been much better off being presented as instructions on the CD to use up some of the remaining 670 MB or so of disk space that wasn't used. Despite lacking in a couple of areas, I still found LEGO Mindstorms Interfacing to be quite a useful book. Although I did at times wonder about the actual usefulness of some applications, that really can't be a complaint as they are still interesting and educational - and hey, if it's in the name of experimentation, than it has to be good! But it's the technical information presented that makes the book worth purchasing as it really does open up the LEGO Robotics Invention System to a whole wide world of new capabilities and programming techniques. I give it 4 stars out of 5. Buy it here!