LEGO Mindstorms’ Full Pre-birth Story
My first Mindstorms’ Incubation blog talked very briefly about the MIT Media Lab Programmable Brick project that was eventually productized by LEGO as the LEGO Mindstorms. Today I’ll cover Mindstorms’ full pre-birth milestones dated back to 1970:
1970: MIT’s Mechanical Engineering department started its famous undergrad robotic class “Design and Manufacturing I”, known as class 2.70 among the students. The 2.70 class is significant in our story because it essentially inspired the 6.270 Autonomous LEGO Robot class we talked about in the “Incubation” blog. In the 2.70 class, MIT undergraduates were given a box of kit parts to build robots that competes against each other on a specific task. These 2.70 robots are brainless mechanical contraptions wired to “joysticks” controlled by students during the robot contests. In contrast, the 6.270 LEGO Robots are totally autonomous. Nonetheless the 2.70 class is cool in its own way and was among the few famous classes that attract high school kids around the world to attend MIT - to say the least. More 2.70 information can be found at:
- 2.70 History and Videos
- 2.70’s Home
- Parts List
The 2.70 contest continues to run today and was renamed from 2.70 to 2.007 recently.
1987: Michael Parker was inspired by the 2.70 class and created a scaled down 3-week Computer Science version of the class now known as 6.270. We’ll call this Computer Science robotic class the LEGO Robot class from now on because that’s essentially what it is: Students build and program autonomous LEGO-based robots to compete against each other.
1990+: Fred Martin and Randy Sargent joined the LEGO Robot team and contributed significant amount of improvements into the LEGO Robot Competition class. The class became extremely popular among the students and eventually turned into yet another world famous MIT class of all times. Fred and Randy gave the class what it desperately needed in 1990. They designed an expandable and powerful hardware controller board and wrote the Interactive-C interpreter. This combination of hardware and software became the foundations for the LEGO Robot class. With the controller board and software, students could quickly and reliably integrate LEGO robots with RadioShack-grade motors and sensors and program the robots using Interactive C to perform complex tasks. The class was so oversubscribed that students could spend 2 years on a wait list before they could take the class. But no one needs to despair inside or outside of the school. Fred and Randy made all the hardware specification and software tools from the class readily available online so any robot enthusiast can go get their hands dirty.
The software and hardware Fred and Randy created were surprisingly robust consider that they are really just class ware. The interpreter/programming languge Interactive-C even allows advance features like creating multiple threads to perform multiple tasks in parallel - which I’ll write more about later. In the years following 1990 outside of MIT, the LEGO Robot Class was widely adopted into many universities’ and high schools’ curriculums. And today you can buy a few variants of the MIT LEGO Robot kit online. These kits allow robot enthusiasts to build much more programmable and customizable robot than the RCX or even the not-yet-available NXT would allow. The downside is that sensors and motors have to be assembled from off-the-shelf parts which is slightly inconvenient. If you are interested building a robot that way, go get a pre-RCX kit at www.handyboard.com. The total package isn’t cheap but you get an MIT-grade robot kit and C-programmability without having to pay for MIT’s undergrad tuition. Consider that a steal!
I had some pictures of the 1993 version of the controller board in my “Incubation” blog if you want to see what the pre-RCX board looked like.
1992-1993: LEGO and various corporate sponsors continued to make financial contributions to the 6.270 robotic class and to the MIT Media Lab where Fred and Randy were doing their graduate studies. Around 1992, LEGO finally considered getting something in return from the Media Lab. LEGO asked Fred and Randy (through Mitchel Resnick who was Fred and Randy’s thesis advisor) to prototype a more user friendly robot kit. Fred and Randy agreed and assembled a small group of undergraduates that included me among few others to help build this kit they later named the “Programmable Brick”. In the summer of 1992, Fred and Randy finished the Programmable Brick design by basically shrinking the MIT 6.270 controller board from a DIMM based PCB into a tiny SMC based board. Some features were removed because of size constrain. I worked on the Programmable Brick’s serial port Interactive-C byte code downloader, basically porting the downloader from C to Mac LISP. Other things I can recall doing were LEGOrizing sensors, motors lots of soldering and building prototype Programmable Brick enclosure from different plastic materials. The most awkward part of the project was manually soldering the tiny surface mount chips and capacitors onto the Programmable Brick’s circuit board. I strained my eyes so much soldering needle-size pins that are no more than 1mm apart that by the time I was done soldering half a board, I’d raise my head and see everything in total blur. I remember vividly that one summer day when I did my first soldering job, my eyes were so screwed that I decided to quit early and quickly dragged myself back to my East Campus dorm room across from the Media Lab. Sure we also had lots of fun time like getting paid to shop in Cambridge’s Lechmere area for plastic material to prototype the Programmable Brick’s enclosure. And then being chauffeured back to campus by Randy in his small Japanese car after shopping…
In a summer’s effort by Randy and Fred really, we created a Programmable Brick that was a much more eye pleasing than the original green and exposed 6.270 circuit board. It has about the same form factor as the RCX. Here are some pictures of the 1993 summer Programmable Brick:
(click on the image to zoom in)
Randy and Fred are the true grand parents of Mindstorms RCX. I’ll blog about these two cool dudes later.
What happened after LEGO got the prototype is well documented in LEGO’s history book:
1998: LEGO Mindstorms RCX released.
2006: NXT announced at CES.
That’s my version of Mindstorms’ pre-birth story. Hope you enjoyed it.
